■V .. I ' ¡¡Bp Mi V, iSÉSí'ífeíSi iliiliilgi :*v L - v. JgnmnB MSÉ bp I ft®®®!! ÜB ■tO: rus 22400028825 A. LZ. h Race a study in modern superstition Race A STUDY IN MODERN SUPERSTITION JACQUES BARZUN It's a wise child that knows its own father. WISDOM OF THE NATIONS La Recherche de la Paternité est Interdite. CODE NAPOLÉON Methuen & Co. Ltd., London first published in great britain in i938 WELLCOME INSTITUTE LIBRARY Coll. we 'MOmec Call No Kitl printed in the u. s. a. to the memory of george russell shaw (1848-1937) CONTENTS Preface ix i Race: Fact or Fiction? 3 il The Nordic Myth 27 m Race and Anthropology 51 iv Gobineau 72 V Race and the Fine Arts 110 vi Aryan, Semite and Celt 13 5 vu Scientific Anthropology 159 vin Race and the Nationalistic Wars: 1870- 1900 183 ix Race and the Nationalistic Wars: 1900- 1914 210 x Race in the Modern World 242 xi Race: The Modern Superstition 270 Appendix— Race-Thinking: A Brief Anthology 301 Bibliographical Notes 32J Index 341 PREFACE AN author has three points to settle: To what sort his work belongs, for what description of readers it is in tended, and the particular end or object that it is to answer. To meet these points in order, it must be said that the present volume attempts to be a critical history of the Idea of Race in recent times. Though based on research, it is intended for the general educated reader, and the particular end or object of the book is to show how equally ill-founded are the commonplace and the learned views of race. Although the task of research and writing was com pleted nearly a year ago, certain motives of diffidence kept the author from putting the final touches to the manuscript and preparing it for the press. As Aldous Huxley has recently remarked, modern writers seem to do little else than tell the rest of the world how it should think and behave. To add even a modest volume to the pile of hortatory literature seemed an act that deserved thinking over twice. Two factors overcame this hesi tancy. One was the author's gratitude to the American Council of Learned Societies for generously subsidizing eighteen months of travel and reading in Europe at the beginning of this study. The other was the repeated ex perience arising from reading or conversation with friends and students, of being in possession of facts that ix seemed to be overlooked in the arguments both for and against race-beliefs and in the history of modern race- prejudice. The possession of such facts was felt as a burden and a responsibility. It is to discharge these two heartfelt obligations rather than in the hope of correcting an evil and receiving the customary reward of the self-appointed moralist that these chapters are in print. One word more, concerning the absence from these pages of any overwhelming "scholarly apparatus." The European tradition of limiting footnotes, quotations, and bibliography to a strict minimum has been followed in preference to any other. The accuracy of a page refer ence has never insured the accuracy of the spirit in which the quotation is made, nor of the thinking which rests upon it. No increase of the accessories can dispel mis trust, and the wish to "check up" on an author's truth fulness is baffled rather than served by the discovery that what he says is indeed to be found on such and such a page of such and such a book. Good scholarship has always been the joint work of diligence, honesty, and art, and these are qualities not to be measured by the amount of scaffolding left lying about in the finished product. To conclude appropriately with a violation of this canon, a quotation from Emerson's Journals sums the matter up by placing the responsibility where it belongs: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." J. B. Nine Acre Corner Concord, Mass. RACE a study in modern superstition Chapter L RACE: FACT OR FICTION? I Proudly they learn all mankind to contemn; And all their race are true-born Englishmen. • • • • • A true-born Englishman's a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction; A banter made to be a test of fools, Which those that use it justly ridicules; A metaphor invented to express A man akin to all the universe. —daniel defoe, i7oi AMONG the words that can be all things to all men, the word Race has a fair claim to being the most common, the most ambiguous, and the most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are everywhere spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what Race means. Race seems to embody a fact as simple and obvious as the noonday sun, but if that is really so, why the endless wrangling about the idea and the facts of race? Why is it that every writer and every man, lit erate or illiterate, differs from every other on the ques tions: What is a race? How can it be recognized? Who constitute the several races? Which are superior? Which nearest the ape and which nearest the image of the Creator? These questions are not the playthings of academic minds. Today no argument is needed to prove that race and the feelings connected with race are one of the powers shaping the world. One European nation of sev enty million inhabitants is governed by men whose main policies involve certain hard-and-fast race-beliefs. An other European nation not long since found it useful to whip up animosity against black-skinned men to help justify an imperialistic war. In the Balkans, in Turkey, in Persia, in Scandinavia, in Holland, sizable groups of the population work with or without government back ing to boost their own "racial type" at the expense of all the others. "Oppressed nationalities" in Catalonia, Brittany, Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine, and Palestine throw race into the balance of their economic and social griev ances as an important makeweight. Immigrants from the various countries of Europe have spread the virulent germs of modern race-feeling into other parts of the world, notably the United States, where the older an tagonism of whites against all other colored races has had a long history of prejudice and violence. There and elsewhere racial identification with Mussolini and the Negus Negusti has made Italians clash with Negroes. Jews and Nazis exchange hard words in the press, pass resolutions in State legislatures, struggle for power and recognition of their principles in the courts. In public and private institutions they intrigue for dismissals, ap pointments, and promotions, the net result of the struggle being an increase in anti-Semitism. Race may indeed be a mere pretext or it may be the aegis of a sincere fanati cism. In either case it is a reality in the minds of millions who hold the lives and fortunes of their neighbors in their hands. The sequel to the termination of the Gentle men's Agreement between the United States and Japan in 1924 shows how dangerous it is to tamper with this reality on any grounds, political, social, or intellectual. The very vagueness of the concept of race adds to its protean power, for to the racialist and to his victims the "facts of race" are a scientific truth as well as a belief satisfying deep mystical impulses. This threat to a world order is no less strong in the intellectual realm. More and more the national cultures are seeking to exclude one another on the ground of the racial incompatibility of minds. The idea of race makes easy the transition from cultural to political ill-feeling and when we want to condemn some course of national action in our neighbors, race provides the universal joint that holds together the aliens' ignoble traditions, their present shameful course, and their innate perversity. This pattern of judgment is familiar to contemporaries of the World War, whose sincere and passionate belief in the wickedness of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche—cultural enemies—was as strong as their hatred of political foes like Bismarck or the Kaiser, and as useful to the Cause as poison gas or tanks. Within national boundaries, race as a basis of judg ment in matters of art and thought helps carry on the critics' war. It nourishes smug self-approval, stiffens fac tions, and decides among the imponderables. Russian music, jazz, atonality, and other live issues are discussed by critics as conservative as Ernest Newman and Olin Downes in terms of "barbarian races," "racial strain," "Celtic melancholy," and "Afro-American harmonic elements." In the cooler regions of mathematics and philosophy, abstract and passionless subjects (as one thinks), "races" are discovered by ingenious scholars— not all of them Germans by any means—and "threats" or "dangers" to the national culture are staved off by dismissal, boycott, or exile. The sincerity of the partisans can hardly be doubted when, as in Germany, the élite of the nation goes in bodily for this form of ideologic warfare. Such manifestations of the race-spirit have led ob servers of the ever-spreading intolerance to believe that it originated exclusively in Germany, more particularly in Nazi Germany. It is quite true that the Third Reich has become the most blatant apostle of racialism in the modern world, but the movement has deeper roots than that régime. Present-day race-propaganda in Germany betrays plainly enough that it uses words and ideas by no means novel in Western culture, and that its ammuni tion is largely borrowed from the European science, art, and history-writing of the past century, without distinc tion of nationality ... or race. Equally important, though generally overlooked, is the fact that articulate minorities in other countries than Germany are fully as much engaged in thinking and talking about race. The only difference is that no other government has yet gone so far as the Nazi régime in adopting race as a popular slogan, despite its obvious value as a means of diverting attention from economic problems and as a satisfaction of the ever-latent zest to persecute. But read attentively the press and political literature not only of England, France, Italy, and the United States, but also of Mexico, Turkey, Rumania, and Scandinavia: you will not read very far before you are told or left to infer that the whites are unquestion ably superior to the colored races; that the Asiatic Peril is a race-peril; that the Japanese of late seem to have become very yellow indeed, so much so that the Chinese have almost become white brothers in comparison; that the great American problem is to keep the Anglo-Saxon race pure from the contamination of Negro (or Southern European, or Jewish) "blood." The quarrel about race and blood is often carried even closer home, as when we are informed that among the whites the tall blond Nordics are a superior breed destined to rule the world and that brown-eyed, round-headed Latins, whether in Europe or in South America, are a degenerate, revolu tionary lot. They have no sense of race-discrimination and are incapable of governing themselves, probably because they live under a hot (and blue) southern sky, wherefore we Anglo-Saxons must take over the ordering of their affairs. But alas! even among Anglo-Saxons, there seem to be impassable barriers of race. Few are the consistent believers in the Nordic unity of Anglo-Saxons and Germans; for the Germans are Teutons, a people notoriously refractory to civilization, as is conclusively shown by the Roman historians and the burning of the Library of Louvain. Of course, the Aryans among us are willing to patch up a good many contradictions if only we can be made to unite against the dreaded Semite with his international ideas, decadent passion for the arts, and intolerable financial ability. The Semite himself is race- conscious and, given his chance, just as scornful and prejudiced as the Aryan who would oppress him. Need less to add, if one keeps one's eyes and ears open, every one of the foregoing statements is found refuted, modi fied, or twisted into strange compounds of incoherent animus. And yet these are but the cruder ways of race- prejudice: they form the common, casual superstition. When we rise into the more rarefied spheres and glance at learned papers on the race of fossil remains, or the proportion of Celtic blood in Shakespeare we get into really deep—and hot—waters. Above the babble of the fanatics one can distinguish a few voices vainly shouting that the notion of race is a myth which all intelligent people should discard. Yet the quarrel about race is certainly not between the un educated, on the one hand, and the cultured élite on the other. Brains, birth, high station, or success in a particu lar profession do not prevent a man from holding fast to race-prejudice. A British Foreign Secretary with a Biblical surname feels it necessary to dispel doubts about his race. "I am not a Jew," says Sir John Simon, reck lessly adding, "I am just an ordinary Briton of Aryan stock." The well-known scientist, Sir Arthur Keith, spends a great deal of time and energy stressing the value of race-prejudice in modern life and urging the necessity of conflict among races as a means of improv ing the species. It is not the German professors alone who make the printing presses grind and groan under the weight of treatises proving that the authors and their friends are Nordics, heirs of the Greeks, and creators of all that is good, true, and beautiful. In France, where it is often thought that race-ideas can take no hold, the most impenitent form of race-superstition thrives, namely, that which is unaware of itself. Indeed, race-controversies raged in France long before they became a constant preoccupation in the rest of Europe. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, race was already a political weapon in the struggle between absolutism, aristocracy, and the middle class. The warfare spread to the arts and philosophy in the nineteenth century, by which time independent shoots in other cultures had also borne fruit, leaving the grand harvesting on a world wide scale to our generation. Viewed in the light of its antecedents and world- spread, the race-question becomes a much bigger affair than the outburst of palaver and persecution observable in present-day Germany. It becomes rather a mode of thinking so intertwined with the culture of modern Eu rope as to constitute an ingrained superstition. The greatest, as well as the weakest, minds of the last century and a half have yielded to its fascination. Other out standing forces of the epoch—Romanticism, Nationalism, Political Democracy, Science, and Imperialism—have re inforced the power of race-thinking in popular as well as educated opinion. It adorns or defaces, as one chooses, every type of mental activity—history, art, politics, sci ence, and social reform. These essays will therefore consider racialism as a European phenomenon, with a special emphasis on the course of race-doctrines in modern France. The reason for stressing French ideas is readily apparent. France has produced some of the most powerful myths and person alities in the field—Montesquieu, Gobineau, Thierry, Renan, and Taine, to mention only the geniuses: with out these there would have been no Hitler as we know him, and a very different Third Reich. France, more over, has always been deemed free from racial prejudice in spite of her very respectable contributions to the fail ing. Lastly, in examining a culture in which race- prejudices are so numerous and diverse as to have pro duced no single national creed, antagonism and contra dictions will be most illuminating. It follows also that by showing the causes and effects of race-thinking in France, more violent manifestations of the same phobia elsewhere cannot be held exceptional and temporary aberrations. In this instance, proving the least is the best way of proving the most. For the race-theorizing of no country and of no man is entirely original. Gobineau may have had a hint from Klemm, as Nietzsche had one from Gobineau. Buffon came before Blumen- race: fact or fiction? bach who came before Thurnam. Thierry and Guizot owe much to Boulainvilliers and Montesquieu, and all of them to Tacitus who, if anyone, deserves burning in effigy for starting the powerful race-dogma of Nordic superiority. Since 1850 race-thinking is international, though it is much less like a stream with numerous tributaries than like an impenetrable jungle ever sprouting more luxuri antly. To follow any one path is to be enmeshed at once in a tangle of quarrels, a confusion of assertions, a knot of facts and fictions that revolt the intellect and daunt the courage of the most persistent. In its mazes, race- thinking is its own best refutation. If sense and logic can lead to truth, not a single system of race-classifica tion can be true. Indeed, speaking in a mood of paradox, one could say that the only logical argument in favor of the diversity of races would be that no one race could possibly have been gifted with such a capacity for non sense as the literature of the subject aifords. II What race do you belong to? A white citizen of France is of French race and French na tionality .—united states application form for citizenship papers SUPPOSE for a moment that the word and concept Race were wholly alien to our vocabulary and thinking, and that someone to whom it was familiar were trying to tell us what it meant. How could he go about it? He might begin by saying that a race was a group of people of all ages and sexes who were found in one place and resembled one another. We should certainly object to that definition as being too vague. How large is "one place" and what does resemblance amount to? In some ways all men and all animals resemble one another; but in another way, no two individuals are alike. The query would open up a broad field of argument, for even sup posing that our interlocutor mentioned a white skin and light hair as the signs denoting a given race, we should find it difficult to agree on the precise point where white skin ends and dark begins among individuals. The Ber bers of North Africa are blue-eyed and lighter-skinned than the Sicilians, and as Shaw has pointed out, a really white man would be a horrible sight. The same difficulty would arise about light hair or brown eyes; indeed all the characteristics of the human body that might be named as criteria would be found in actuality to merge into a finely-graded series which one can break up into groups only by being arbitrary and saying, as of skin, "I shall call this man white, and that one, a shade darker, black." Moreover we should find that contrary to com mon opinion, no set of fixed characteristics occurs in human beings as a constant distinguishing mark of race. So-called Nordics have long skulls but so have many so-called Negroes, the Eskimos, and the anthropoid apes. The "Mongolian" birth-spot occurs among the whites and the Ainos in Japan frequently show features that should class them as "Nordics." This lack of conformity is bad enough but we could also stump our informant with another query. What if the striking differences of skin and hair and eyes were more striking than significant? A knowledge of the normal life of men in society suggests that a Japanese scientist is in many ways more like an American scientist than either is like a manual laborer of his own color. In other words, it is fallacious to consider human beings as mere arrangements of organs, apart from their func tions, their habits, and their minds. If we voiced this objection, the word Mind would probably recall to our friend the great differences among the shapes of the human skull, thought to be related to mental differences, and expressible in index numbers, but if we forced him to be a little clearer about what is meant by dolichocephalic and brach y cephalic and what can be inferred from this classification of skulls (as we ourselves shall do in Chapter VII) we would soon find ourselves in a labyrinth of contradictions fit to make us despair of discovering a reliable token of race. To be sure another word than Mind is for many people the clue to race and it might be advisable to examine its merits. That word is Blood. For the French and German racialists the word is the infallible oracle, the original Logos containing the answer to all questions. Conversations with many intelligent Nazis convinces one that for them the phrase Mein Blut spricht is no figure of speech. In their minds, Blood is synonymous with race, with conscience, with honesty, with artistic judgment, and with a sense of their own superiority. To less ardent mortals blood is merely a tissue like any other, except that it is carried in a serous fluid and that it circulates through the body. The blood of neither parent is directly communicated to the offspring and the properties of any individual's blood are not ascertainable without fairly complicated tests, none of them infallible. In any case, these tests, according to competent serolo- gists, have nothing to do with determining race. At this point we assume that neither we nor our racial-minded mentor give up the attempt to gain a clear idea of what all the world is talking about when it says Race. What next? Well, we might formulate a definition borrowed from animal husbandry whereby a race is the total num ber of descendants from common ancestors, that is, all the offspring from one pair of progenitors. Adam and Eve are the traditional human pair in Christendom, but they hardly help if one is looking for distinct races in mankind. One pair of ancestors would obviously make us all of one race. How account for the "striking dif ferences" that caught our attention earlier? It is not usual for "white" parents to give birth to "Hindu" chil dren. And yet the divergence between the original pair of ancestors and their offspring must have occurred somewhere. The influence of environment readily sug gests itself as a cause of modification. In other words, we arrive naturally at the climate-theory of races which has had a long and troubled history. It includes all explana tions from the simple ascription of a dark skin to the heat of the sun, to the oversubtle explanation of German philosophy by means of fog and heavy annual rainfall. At this juncture two questions arise: How do "striking characters" get transmitted from parent to progeny? and What are the results of mixing strikingly different groups? The answer to the first question is the subject of a whole science, Genetics, and its most competent students are the most hesitant to give categorical an swers. Some of the facts of heredity are known, but these are few compared to the questions that an average educated man could ask without even the remote hope of getting an answer. This is not the place, and the author lacks the competence to deal with particular problems of heredity. What few general remarks can be made will be found further on, together with the simple conclusion that the idea of race does not make sense until we know a great deal more about the transmission of individual and family traits. To build racial anthro pologies without a solid genetics is like starting a house with the roof. This self-evident proposition has, never theless, not deterred even the best scientific minds of this and the last century. That is why we cannot stop the discussion of race here, but must show in detail how absurd and unsubstantial, and what a confused wreck age, all the unsupported roofs of the nineteenth-century anthropological erections really are. We are no nearer finding out what a race is by asking biology than we were by measuring skulls or judging at sight on the basis of pigmentation. The remaining meth ods are even less promising. First comes history. We can arbitrarily go back to the time of the Germanic invasions in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d . and find in the struggle of peoples after the Fall of Rome the origin of modern races. We shall then juggle with the names of Celts, Gauls, Iberians, Ligurians, Helvetii, Belgae, Bryth- ons, Latins, Franks, Normans, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Lombards, or Burgundians. But when it comes to deter mining who these were, where they lived, whether they survived, what they looked like and whether in our day, the French writer, Rémy de Gourmont, is a Gaul or a Norman x —one man's guess is nearly as good as another's. Next we can try nationalism. We can as sert, with Sir Arthur Keith, that a race and a nation are synonymous; that several hundred years of a com mon history and a common way of life have welded people of divergent physiques into one race. That defi nition hardly defines. Under it, the "renegade English man" Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who elected Ger many as his Fatherland would be of German race. The language spoken is an equally unsatisfactory criterion. By that token Henry James and Joseph Conrad would be of the same race, though one was born in New York, 1 This typical "problem" is drawn from Havelock Ellis, who ex plains de Gourmont by his Norman blood, blue eyes, "with the golden glow of an autumn leaf," his Viking race, etc. From Rousseau to Proust, 1935, pp. 307, 309, 312, 314 and 322 n. race: fact or fiction? 17 and the other in the Ukraine. Some people are bilingual, and the race of a head-waiter would be beyond con jecture. As for "centuries of common history" that is a com mon metaphor, but it is an inexact statement of fact. Human beings do not live through centuries of common history and what they pick up of the past through edu cation or common report varies greatly according to social class and intellectual powers. The "common way of life" is equally fallacious, except in self-contained, one-class communities; and this is true in spite of the tremendous power over mass emotions which the press, the cinema, and the radio have acquired in the recent past. They are powerful agents of assimilation but they have hardly had time to create distinct breeds of men. The fact that one can make forty million Britons believe for a time in the German atrocities is no test of their belonging to the same race. It only proves them to be men by proving them to be gullible. We are still far from our original goal, which was to understand what a race of men, in contradistinction to other races of men, might be. But if we give up the pursuit on our own account, we must still see what men who have thought and written about race think it is. Their ideas form, not a definition of race, for they all disagree among themselves, but a type of thinking, which I shall call race-thinking, and which bears certain easily recognizable features. III . . . the new importance that has been attached for the last half-century to the idea of common descent as opposed to that of mere artificial nationality has made a word necessary. "Ra cial" is not the word that might have been or namental as well as useful; but it is too well established to be now uprooted— h. w. and f. G. fowler in The King's English, 1906 RACE-THINKING does not consist merely in believ ing a particular theory about human races, and to refute the Nazi believer in Nordic or Aryan supremacy would not suffice to show up the basic error involved in the notion of a Nordic or Aryan race. It would only let the disillusioned racialist fall into the arms of the Celti- cist, the Yellow Peril fanatic, or the dolichocephalic anthropologist. What must be extinguished is the passion for labeling and classifying large groups of people on insufficient evidence. That remarkable urge to lump to gether the attributes of vast masses with which we can have no acquaintance is common to everyone. "The Japanese are a crafty and imitative race." "Isn't that typically American?" "That is a Jewish trait." "Nordic self-control." Why do we all feel an inward satisfaction in mouthing these inexact platitudes? Why does it take conscious restraint to keep from doing it at every turn? Some answers will be suggested throughout this book. At this point it is only needful to note the type of think ing which produces them to realize that if one theory or generalization is destroyed by facts, the mind that enter tained it is not proof against falling into another. The strength or weakness of the theory is irrelevant to the problem. The mental habit is to blame; for peace and understanding, it would be just as important to make the Jews drop the idea that they are a race as it would be to make the Germans stop persecuting them because of their supposedly being one. If the reader will now endeavor to suspend judgment in these matters until the conclusion of this study, he may without permanent harm to his own mind gain a useful insight into the workings of those of his con temporaries—including in that term most thinkers, great and little, of the last 150 years. To mark off the scope of the study, let us say at once that race-thinking is exhibited not only by anthropologists and ethnologists, not only by historians and publicists who make up sys tems of race-discrimination, but likewise by everyone who in a casual or considered remark implies the truth of any of the following three propositions: i. That mankind is divided into natural types on the basis of certain recognizable physical features, trans mitted by the process of generation and leading to dis tinctions among "pure" and "mixed" races. Example: "The races amongst whom the Greeks planted themselves were in some cases on a similar level of culture. Where the natives were still backward or barbarous, they came of a stock either closely related to the Greek or at least separated from it by no great physical differences. Amalgamation with the native races was easy and it involved neither physical nor intellectual degeneracy as its consequence. Of the races with which the Greeks came in contact the Thracian was far from the highest in the scale of culture; yet two of the great est names in the Great Age of Athens are those of men who had Thracian blood in their veins, Cimon and the historian Thucydides." (E. M. Walker, Pro-Provost of Queen's College, Oxford, Encyclopedia Britannica , 14th ed., vol. X, p. 766.) 2. That mental and moral behavior can be referred to the physical structure of the individual and that knowl edge of the structure or of the racial label which denotes it, provides a satisfactory account of the behavior. Example: "In March last [the book] was subjected to a brief but pungent critique by Du Bois-Reymond, the celebrated Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sci ences in Berlin. . . . He thus exposes himself to the suspicion—which, unhappily is not weakened by his other writings—that the fiery Celtic blood of his country occasionally runs away with him, converting him for the time into a scientific Chauvin." (John Tyndall, Fragments of Science, vol. I, p. 385.) 3. That ideas, capacities, art, morals, and personality are the product of social groupings variously termed race, nation, class, family, without further defining of the group intended, or inquiry into the particular rela tion between the group and the product under discus sion. Example: "Yet there is in Celtdom a certain literary feeling which does not exist in Anglo-Saxondom. It is diffused, no doubt, and appreciative rather than creative, and lacking in the sterner critical spirit which is so neces sary to all creative work; still it is there, and it is de lighted with the rolling sound of the noble phrase. . . . So far then, as a man three-parts Celt, I was by nature inclined to the work of words. . . (Arthur Machen, Far Off Things, p. 86.) These three generalized types of race-thinking lead and merge into one another. Few writers limit them selves to one of these premises, and mankind at large entertains all three with equal readiness according to their suitability for the occasion. The reason for dis tinguishing among them is primarily to show that the formal rejection of type one, two, or three is no guar antee against succumbing to the basic fallacy of race- classification. What this assumption is, can perhaps be best described in its ordinary manifestations. In every day usage the ascription of race takes no account of particular facts; it merely appeals to common knowl edge. It considers, for example, the nation a natural force that selects and organizes human qualities and defects into certain patterns. From so considering the nation it is easy to shift to the family, class, college, or tradition. We thus get not only the German mind or the Greek mind but also the bourgeois mind and the Harvard mind, and, as we see daily in novels, 2 plays and biographies, 3 the X-, Y-, or Z-family mind 4 which sup posedly accounts for the hero's personality. It may sound as if this criticism of a common practice were a denial of the obvious fact that people who belong to the same family, nation, climate, class, or "race" have a tendency to think alike, even to look alike. No such denial is asserted or implied anywhere in this book. What is asserted and implied is that these tendencies to think and look alike, if they exist, must be proved. They must not be merely presumed. The particular individual of whom the group quality is predicated must be studied in his own person and in his relation to the group before the label can be affixed. The necessity for so doing is obvious. The problem of when and how similarities of body and mind occur, and to what degree, is extraordi narily complex, and man's fatal tendency is to assume greater simplicity and regularity in nature than actually exists. That propensity is the source of the countless over-simplifications studied in this book as race-theories. Possibly if we could study environment, descent, nation, climate, and class for a billion years and if these were 2 See, for example, in Meredith's Beauchamp^s Career, the character of Everard. 3 For a condensed example involving Ravel, Rabelais, and Berlioz, see P. Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits, quoted on pp. iio-iu of this book. 4 "Race" or "stock" is often substituted for "mind" in these senses— another indication of the vagueness of the idea thus denoted. static agencies, we might arrive at some rules enabling us to ascertain their part in shaping human character. But the race-thinker, whatever his affiliation, does no such thing. He takes the ready-made names by which we refer to the factor in question and from the name deduces arbitrarily what he wishes to find. The Mon golians are crafty; the British have no sense of humor; brachycephalic people are excitable; the Aryan is a born leader. Finally, persuaded by his own glibness, the race- believer comes to see only those instances that seem to bear out his preconceived notion. He does not con sciously suppress evidence against his thesis, he becomes blind to its presence and immune to its presentation by others. The formula is applied to groups and individuals and to the quick and the dead. As a classical scholar has pointed out in treating of the familiar "character" of ancient peoples—Greek equipoise, Roman gravity, and so forth: "Our reverence for scientific method has made us the more prone to pick out a single characteristic of a people as a convenient label for a pigeon-hole and then ignore other possible descriptions. We talk glibly of the Greek mind, the medieval mind, and the like—as if there has ever been more than one kind of mind—and we forget that it is merely environment that emphasizes one fashion at a given time, in thought as in dress, with out, however, obliterating other fashions. Certainly the prevailing temper or trait is illuminating, but it must not so focus our attention upon itself as to exclude other attitudes or traits which in their aggregate may be more significant." (M. Hadas, Classical Journal, Oct., 1935, p. 18.) The connection between this habit and scientific method is especially paradoxical. One would think that the so-called scientific habit of thought would tend to make us extremely careful in dealing with details and differences. It should seem as if the object under con sideration, be it a man or a group, would be looked at from every angle, seen as it really appears. The very opposite has happened. The modern passion is to lump individuals together on the most superficial, unverified grounds of similarity and describe them en masse. What should we think of a chemist, or even of a mere drug gist, who would class all white powders as bicarbonate of soda and dispense them on that convenient principle? When a habit of thinking conducted on these lines be comes quasi-universal, sinks out of the conscious mind to reappear in everybody's mouth as the most obvious of truths, then it is no exaggeration to term it a supersti tion, ranking honorably in history with the belief in witchcraft and horoscopes. To sum up our attempt at finding a satisfactory defi nition of race, one that will really define and yet cor respond to the facts, we may say that so far we have seen only its practical and intellectual difficulties, which ought to make any prudent man suspend judgment until Genetics can offer a more complete body of knowledge. But to expect prudence in thinking about subjects with emotional content is folly, too; and so we shall find that the racialists of the last 150 years leap over the initial obstacle to race-theorizing, make assumptions to suit their object and do not define their terms any more than the man in the street who borrows their language with out questioning its validity. The educated reader him self, accustomed to understand what is intended by most of the casual references to race, may find it difficult, in the pages that follow, to accept the notion of "race- thinking" as a single tendency or pattern underlying all the common race-systems and racial adjectives. To try to do so seems at first like having to forget well- known facts and pretending that one never knew them. In his effort, the reader will be further bewildered by the necessarily rapid and continual shift of attention from politics, history-writing, and linguistics to art, philosophy, and anthropology; and he will no doubt be repeatedly baffled by the faithful transcript of some dis tinguished racialist's views when these have been juxta posed to test their sincerity or consistency. These "views" the reader should not try to take in as a coherent communication; he should merely look at them, noting that they form a cipher rather than attempt to decode its message. At the risk of repetition, it must be stressed again that the author's purpose is to show how and why a pattern of race-thinking was built up which requires just such explanations as these, and which calls for an indulgent and elastic mind from the reader trained by habit to supply meanings for its commonplaces. But what is a conclusion for the author is at this point only a hy pothesis to the reader. The idea that race-thinking is not a fanatical trait of system-makers but a form of erroneous thinking that can be charged with a dozen ulterior motives ought to make plain the continuity and relevance of the narrative embodied in the next ten chapters; and the facts presented in that narrative ought to give the original hypothesis the character of a legiti mate conclusion concerning an important phase of Western life and thought. Chapter il. THE NORDIC MYTH I The outstanding trait of the German character is that it has no need of prestige, domination or precedence; that it is sufficient unto itself.— bismarck MODERN Germany has taught the world at least one useful lesson, namely, that race-theories generally have a practical political purpose. The fact is not peculiar to Hitlerism. Although in Homer there is no racial feel ing of Greek versus Barbarian, it is present in Herodo tus, who makes the Athenians speak to the Spartans of their common Greek brotherhood as an argument for joining forces against the Medes (Bk. VIII, ch. 144). Still it is but a subsidiary reason, which crops up here and there only fitfully among later historians until the first century of our era. It was in that century, very probably in the year 98, that Tacitus composed his short essay on the Ger mans which contains so many of the facts and so much of the feeling that animates modern racialism. Tacitus wrote as traveler, historian, and moralist but especially as an embittered foe of the Imperial tyranny. Hence his eulogy of the Germanic race is systematic and politi cally pointed. According to him the Germans are an indigenous race; they are virtuous, individualistic, free dom-loving, and jealous of their racial purity; physically 27 they are tall and blond, brave and tough, they live frugally and are adventurous rather than toilsome. "What is very remarkable in such prodigious numbers, a family likeness obtains throughout the nation." Almost every line of the 30-page pamphlet contains some assertion embodying the germ of present-day Nordicism, and the piece as a whole is the model of all political race-theories: it combines physical criteria, mental qualities, and an implied or expressed superiority. It is noteworthy that a re-edition of Tacitus' Germania by Lathom in 1851 created quite a stir in European in tellectual circles but it is not true that modern political racialism leaped back to 98 a.d. for its choicest weapons. Tacitus and his tract had already been used in France to meet a similar political situation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leaning on the Germania for a description of the special gifts and institutions of the Frankish or Germanic race, the Count Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) evolved the still lively no tion that all freedom and independence come from the Germanic strain. Hence Louis XIV's absolute mon archy, based on the Roman idea of the imperium, was a government fit only for slaves. Boulainvilliers wanted the nobles of his day to revolt against slavish institu tions and restore the aristocratic freedom of the Ger man forest. 1 a For a full account of the growth of these ideas from Tacitus to the French Revolution see: Jacques Barzun, The French Race, Theo ries of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications, Colum bia University Press, N. Y., 1932. Boulainvilliers' theories did not fall on deaf ears. He split educated opinion and political thinkers in France into two camps—the Germanists and the Romanists, and opened a breach which has not yet been healed, there or elsewhere, between the partisans of two races that sup posedly stand for divergent political ideals. Gobineau in the nineteenth century was a modern Boulainvilliers, as are today many Members of the Action Française group, despite their Royalism. In the eighteenth cen tury, the distinguished litterateur Abbé Dubos was the champion of the Romanist cause. But he was crushed by the haughty and devastating Montesquieu who, for his own anglophile purposes, was delighted to find that the "beautiful system" of freedom embodied in the Eng lish Parliament had been "discovered in the forests of Germany." Mably, the Marquis d'Argenson, and Sieyès were defenders of the Gallo-Romans, while Saint- Simon and Mlle de Lézardière (the first woman his torian of France) were rather inclined to be Germanists. Only two men—the two greatest of the century—stayed out of the fray. Rousseau, because he was essentially a political realist, knew that these capriciously built-up appeals to an uncertain past were nothing but the cloak of present ambitions for power. Voltaire, because he was essentially a humorist, was sure that retrospective his tory based on racial descent was farcical. "I have but lately read a book," he writes, "beginning, 'The Franks, from whom we are descended . . .' Halloo, my friend, who told you that you were descended in a straight line from a Frank?" (Œuvres, Beuchot ed., vol. 29, p. 471.) In England Boulainvilliers was widely read, not only because of his historical ideas but because of his con nection with the important movement of freemasonry, and the result was that the doctrine of Germanic free dom and individualism, of race conflict as the explana tion of governmental institutions, incubated sufficiently to come to a head in the historians of the mid-nineteenth century—Carlyle, Kemble, Freeman, Stubbs, John Rich ard Green—until it became a commonplace in the mouths of the entire "Anglo-Saxon" populace by the end of the period. In nineteenth-century France the inheritance of this politico-racial doctrine involving Nordic superiority was complicated by the political realignments of the Revo lutionary and Napoleonic periods. Just before the French Revolution the Abbé Sieyès, the author of What is the Third Estate? had tried to settle the race-issue for all time. The nobility, said Sieyès, claims that its political rights are based on the inheritance by blood of the privileges won in the Frankish conquest. "Very well. We, the Gallo-Roman plebs, will now conquer the nobility by expelling and abolishing them. Our rights will supersede theirs on exactly the principle they invoke." This reductio ad absurdum of the conquest argument worked very well in its day, for the leaders of the French Revolution were eager to substitute the natural Rights of Man for the haphazard rights con ferred by history—or race. But with the accession of Napoleon, the reinstatement of monarchy, and the re turn of the émigrés, the race-issue revived in a new and more complicated form. Sieyès, by simplifying everything, had really con fused everything. Under the old régime, Boulainvil- liers and Montesquieu as aristocrats had wanted "free dom" from the centralized monarchy. They had ap pealed to old Germanic rights and customs but had failed to obtain any aristocratic "freedom" under the monarchy. Instead, the bourgeoisie had overthrown both the monarchy and the aristocracy and had lumped the two—through the voice of Sieyès—into one Ger manic tyranny. "Freedom" had thereby changed camps, from the Franks to the Gallo-Romans. This is the initial alteration of the Nordic myth of freedom found in T acitus. The second complication is due to the rise of Cel ticism, to be discussed elsewhere in this book. The Gauls and Romans were no longer thought of in oppo sition to the Franks, but came to represent two racial characters. Napoleon reflected this attitude when he preferred to consider himself the heir of both Caesar (the Roman) and Charlemagne (the German) and de spised the French for their Gallic (Celtic) failings: "Our frivolity, our inconsequence come from the re mote past. We are still Gauls . . . Credulity and loiter ing are the national character of the French since the time of the Gauls." ( Maximes et Pensées de Bonaparte, pp. 193-5-) This view of the racial division of France into Franks, Gauls, and Romans was not subsequently ad hered to in every instance of politico-racial animus, but it played a part in the revived antagonism between what has been called the two Frances. 2 No one conversant with the history of France can deny the presence in that country of two contending parties. They are now called Right and Left and they tend to find the ground of their divergence in the French Revolution. The Right is Catholic, conservative, frequently monarchical or fascist. The Left is liberal, anticlerical, frequently so cialist or communist. Many observers, however, find the division to be older than that, going back to the pe riod of the Reformation, and to the heresies and dis- affections of peasant and serf during the Middle Ages. It was therefore with the momentum of these con flicts behind it that the Nordic race-issue, hopefully buried by Sieyès, was reopened at the beginning of the last century. II The mystical belief in race, which has played almost no part in France. . . .—e. seilliere, 1911 AFTER the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the restored Bourbons not only brought back the most reactionary 2 Michelet seems to have coined the term. See Paul Seippel's book of that title, Lausanne-Paris, 1905. of the émigrés, but also created a public for histories and political theories designed to blast those of the French Revolution. The Revolution had theoretically leveled all men, had legislated into existence the eight eenth-century rationalist concept of Man, in whom without distinction of rank, creed, or race, certain rights were inherent. The task of the reactionary theorists con sisted chiefly in showing that there is no such thing as Man; that only men exist and that therefore laws, con stitutions, and social hierarchy must be made to suit par ticular types, i.e., races of men. Moreover, the natural inequality of men being taken as a basic principle, and hierarchy as a stabilizing force, it follows that the aris tocracy, the middle, and the lower classes must trans mit their several characteristics by process of genera tion; in other words, they too are races. Such was the teaching of the greatest political theorists of the Reac tion, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. The for mer, a diplomat, traveler, and wit, is a mystic when it comes to the rights of race: "There has never been a ruling family to whom a plebeian origin could be as signed. If this phenomenon occurred, it would be epoch- making." ( Principe Générateur des Constitutions Poli tiques, Pref., 7.) Among the races his preference goes of course to the Nordics, the durum genus , the hardy breed, which has created the character of all Europe, made it superior to that of Asia, and introduced freedom into the decay of the Roman empire. In France itself, still according to de Maistre, after the barbarian invasions, the nation was more Frankish than Gallic, but as the Franks were fewer, it became more Gallic every day, with the re sult that France is a hybrid nation. ( Consid. sur la France , pp. 441, 445.) This faith has a familiar ring to modern ears, and we are not surprised when we encounter in de Maistre the belief that "Nations are born and die like individuals . . . they have a common soul especially visible in their language." Nations being individuals, they should not mix, they should endeavor to remain "frankly of one race" (pp. 325-7). The vicomte de Bonald, in developing a similar sys tem of monarchical-aristocratic government, pays trib ute to the idea of conquest by which the French no bility came to power, and regrets that in subsequent centuries it relinquished its ideal of racial purity as well as of public service and thus gave a hold to criticism. (Esprit de Bonald, pp. 135, 168; on Mme de Staël, 43 n., p. 48.) Having refurbished the dogmas of Boulainvilliers, these two epigrammatic writers influenced a man of talent but less difficult of approach, the Comte de Mont- losier, who at the behest of Napoleon began to write a systematic history of France suitable to the Imperial ac cession of 1804. The work did not please the emperor, but, slightly modified, it was printed after his fall and enjoyed considerable success. According to Montlosier, the nobility is ancient, Ger man, and frank (free); the bourgeoisie is new and slavish. Its serfdom antedated the arrival of the Franks, for it was the work of Rome. Nevertheless hatred sub sisted between the descendants of Franks and Gallo- Romans and the resulting lack of unity made possible the "great suicide called the Revolution." (I, 108; II, 1-2.) By that phrase, the Count of Montlosier means a part of the nation turning against the other part, a civil war. He offers as a solution, not a return to absolutism, but a free government, an aristocratic régime, based on the Germanic ideas of the old Franks. These three unequal minds—de Maistre, Bonald, and Montlosier—set the tone of the politico-racial contro versy that was to rage in France throughout the cen tury. 3 In politics, it is the familiar quarrel of liberals and republicans versus monarchists. The race-overtones are nothing new and the rearrangement of the Nordic myth was peculiar to France only in its details. Hitler has shown how it applies equally well to the Third Reich. One has but to substitute Marxism for liberalism, Aryan (or Nordic) for Frankish, Semite (or Mediterranean) for Gallo-Roman, and the plot remains the same. In the France of 1815, the reactionaries found ar- 3 At the very end of the century, the conservative historian Fustel de Coulanges felt compelled to write a paper entided "Am I a Ro manist or a Germanist?", and after his death the Action Française used him as a standard-bearer in a political demonstration that turned into a riot. rayed against them the greatest historians of the period —Guizot, Chateaubriand, the brothers Thierry, Miche let, and Edgar Quinet. The first two were compromisers, middle-of-the-road partisans; the rest were outright Liberals; and all concerned themselves with race as an explanation or justification of political opinion. The ap peal to the past became a form of demonstration, and where an obviously selfish interest could not be justified on its own grounds it was somehow sanctified by relat ing it racially to a group of people who were postulated as inherently admirable. Benjamin Constant, the great est liberal force in the first quarter of the century, at tests the political power of these appeals to history. In his famous pamphlet on the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation in Europe (1813) he says: "Our fanatical reformers purposely confuse chronology to kindle and keep up hatred, just as some had gone back to the Franks and Goths to find pretexts in order to oppress in the opposite direction." (Pp. 121-2; 91 n.) Guizot and Chateaubriand do not confuse chronology, nor do they side with only one race. They concede the various racial points made by Boulainvilliers, Dubos, and Mably, which means accepting the three political traditions ascribed to Gauls, Romans, and Franks. Guizot's Essays on French History (1823) are an at tempt to harmonize everything under the banner of legitimacy. But for him as for the others, each of the political principles to be reconciled is a racial heritage. Chateaubriand is equally ready to do justice to the "three races" but he shows a partiality for the south erners: "Let us not exaggerate, as we are only too much in clined to do, this matter of Scandinavian, Slavic and Teutonic origins. . . . Let us remember that the north ern peoples are as peoples younger than we by several centuries. . . ( Etudes Hist., 1833, p. 8.) But having studied the barbarians and re-created the scenes of their conquest of Roman Gaul in his Genius of Christianity (1802) and Les Martyrs (1809), Chateaubriand objects to those who smooth over that troubled time and show it as a period of equality and fraternity. He is probably thinking of the overzealous "Gallic" liberals when he says: "In past history we look for our own image and we are annoyed not to find it. With the spirit of equality which rules us, the ex clusive presence of a few nobles in our annals irritates us. We ask whether we are not worth a great deal more than those fellows, and whether our fathers were of no account in the destinies of our fatherland." ( Analyse de F Histoire de France, p. 21.) Such expressions seem less pointed than our modern clamoring about the Day of the Saxon or Aryan suprem acy, but the thought and emotion behind both are the same. The thought is a continual begging of the ques tion by selecting in the past particular traits and tenden cies and asserting those to be the root of forces or par ties at work in the present. The emotion is one of politi cal expediency: race is a convenient living symbol for ideas and principles, and it is useful propaganda for keeping one's own followers conscious of their worth. The value of historical essays on racial principles is to persuade the "Nordics" themselves that they have a great past, encourage them to feel superior, and justify their attack on a neighboring group. The career of an Augustin Thierry, perhaps the greatest French racial historian, shows how impervious to fact or logic is the utility of race-thinking in politics. Thierry's vocation began at the age of fifteen with the reading of Chateaubriand's Martyrs. Thenceforth, throughout a life of unceasing historical labors, Thierry championed the cause of the Gallic Third Estate in its ages-long struggle with the Frankish invaders. It is true that he saw the "fusion" of the two "races" beginning almost at once and being consummated by the tenth century, but for him in a half-metaphorical, half-literal way, the fight kept on down to the present wherever the two principles which the races supposedly stood for were in opposition. Thierry began by interpreting Eng lish history in terms of the race-struggle between Saxon native and Norman invader. Then in the newspaper Le Courrier Français, he wrote his courageous Letters on French History (1820), the purpose of which was to crystallize liberal opinion against the government of the day by an appeal to national history. At the same time, his friend and brother-historian Thiers was refuting Montlosier in the columns of the Constitutionnel. His tory was indeed the handmaiden of practical politics. But owing to the confusion noted earlier in the uses of the Nordic myth, political liberalism did not al ways adhere to the same racial stock. Edgar Quinet was as much a liberal and a racialist as Thierry, but they do not agree. Quinet thinks that the Romans did not enslave the Gauls only to be ousted by the Franks. He denies any legitimacy of power based on the Roman conquest and condemns the "scholastic mysticism" whereby liberty grows from tyranny and men always do the opposite of what they think they are doing. His pro-Gallic, anti-Roman, partisanship is also directed at the contemporary German scholars who "taught us that our Gallic ancestors were incapable of partaking fully of civilization." (Phil, de PHist. de France; Œuvres, vol. IV, p. 357 seq.) With Quinet, the modern nationalist anti-German spirit was added to the racialism of internal politics. That is partly why race-history did not remain in every country a local controversy. Thierry could, and did, late in life moderate his insistence on the unchanging char acter of the race conflict. But it was too late. The mis chief had been done and the racial tree flourished, not in a desert but in a forest of its own kind. III The history of Europe is that of the Goths of Europe; that of Ireland is that of the Goths in Ireland. — j ohn p inkerton, History of Scotland, 1814 THE question just raised needs amplification: how did this protracted but local controversy take on European proportions? The answer lies partly in the rôle that France played in Europe from 1789 to 1870; partly in the new passion for history during the same period. The nineteenth century is the century of history par ex cellence. The new forces of nationalism and roman ticism both helped to make historical studies paramount and to invest them with a kind of authority which be fore, as mere literature or entertainment, they had never possessed. Hume's eighteenth-century dictum that if you would know the ancient Greeks and Romans you had only to look at the English and French of your own day, was definitely displaced by the idea that each na tion and time had its own particular form, color, and spirit which it was the business of the historian to dis cover and re-create. Romanticism by its insistence on local color and the particular as against the generalized view of Man, by its interest in the Middle Ages and its belief that nothing was strange or exotic, gave an enor mous impetus to historical research. Not only did Scott, Dumas, and Manzoni capture the popular taste with his torical novels, but historical plays drawing upon the annals of the entire world poured from the busy pens of a fertile generation. The educated readers not only of France but of Europe were therefore emotionally prepared for the avalanche of histories revealing to them their own past and their own greatness. But that past and that great ness, for the French, was as we have seen divided in two warring halves, the Right and the Left. To the rest of Europe, France seemed the appointed battleground of these two principles which still divide the world. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 started in France, and from the French racial overtones of the quarrel between middle class and kings described in the preceding sec tion the rest of Europe took its cue. The British his torians' faith in Anglo-Saxon liberty was really a faith in their French colleagues' dictum that the English revo lution of 1688 represents the triumph of the Saxon over the Roman idea of kingship. At the same time Ger- manicus, the anti-Roman hero, became a modern Ger man idol. Charles Kingsley waxed oratorical over Roman vice and Teutonic virtue. Tacitus was re-edited, trans lated, and even when unread, implicitly believed. To these broadly sketched causes of the expansion of race- thinking in Europe must be added secondary and par ticular ones. After the French Revolution, it seemed impossible to go on writing dynastic history—the history of battles and kings. Popular history, in both senses of the word popular, replaced it. Peoples were now invested with the grandeur and sacredness of monarchs. Nations were living entities and the study of modern nations led back to the study of the tribes or races that composed them. Niebuhr in Germany revolutionized the current notions of early Roman history by introducing the factor of race-mixture and race-conflict; Ranke, Mommsen, and Wolff followed in his train, and Michelet learned at their school. Pinkerton and Prichard in England sought to replace the purely political narratives by stress ing, one the Goths, the other the Celtic Indo-Europeans as the fundamental factors in history. The more the history of racial groups gained ground, the more were they regarded as living organisms having an eternal life; and from that notion of race-continuity it was a short step to infer what a single modern Ger man or Gaul or Roman might be as a racial "type." Here again, a French historian—Thierry's younger brother Amédée—took the lead and produced an ex tremely popular History of the Gauls (1828), 4 which presents together with a good deal of involved nonsense, the new kind of historical-physical race-theories. Amédée Thierry not only composes a panegyric upon Roman institutions as all-important in the development of France, but he offers as his central contribution the discovery in Southern Gaul of "two races of men," the Gauls and the Kymris, physically differentiated and hav ing distinct capacities, though both members of the 4 Ten editions appeared in France between 1828 and 1881. Gallic family. The Gauls or Celts, an "eminently in telligent race," are quite distinct from the Germans, though the Kymris, who are a branch of the Gallic family are more nearly Germanic in character than the Gauls. ( 1881 ed., pp. 1-5.) The receptive temper of the times for such "ideas" is shown by the fact that despite many objections to the pro-Gallic thesis, no critic challenged Thierry's com plexities or methods. None, on being told that the Gallic race was "eminently intelligent," questioned whether it meant that some, or most, or all of the "race" were so gifted. It is hard to believe that Thierry meant all, and harder to conceive that he had any means of finding out if most Gauls were intelligent. At the same time no one would dispute that some had brains, a conclusion that leaves the reader just where he was before so far as dis tinguishing the Gauls from the Kymris and the Germans is concerned. This "ethnological science" propounded by the younger Thierry found acceptance in the schools and in the work of many lesser men, and it led, immediately after the original publication, to a result of far-reaching consequence in European thought for it apparently sug gested to an English physician residing in France, W. F. Edwards by name, a physiological theory of race which is in essence our modern one of the Nordic-Latin contrast based on complexion and shape of skull. It will be dealt with in the next chapter. Meantime, both in France and elsewhere nationalism was influencing race-theories. By insisting on common traditions and a common life within the boundaries of the state, nationalism cuts across the division of nine teenth-century Europe into Right and Left. Italy and Germany achieved unification by making nationalism triumph over international liberalism. How did this process affect the race-historians? For an answer we can turn to the typical work of Michelet. Just as it was in reading the Frankish portions of Les Martyrs that Augustin Thierry found his calling, so it was among the Merovingian relics in Lenoir's Museum that Michelet "experienced the vivid realization of history." The question of race arose first for Michelet in his Roman History (1831), in which he praises the German historian Niebuhr for having perceived the im portance of race (p. 17). Two years later, in the first volume of his Histoire de France (1833) begins the struggle in Michelet's mind between the broad vision of the manifold factors that make up the history of the nation and the convenient thread provided by racial in terpretation. It is one of the penalties of toying with the race-notion that even a strong mind trying to re pudiate it will find himself making assumptions and pass ing judgments on the basis of the theory he disclaims. After contradictions due partly to the length of his work and partly to the gradual triumph of the national over the racial idea, Michelet enunciated the famous theory of the "fusion of races" on French soil. Before reaching that point, he sounds very much like a disciple of Augustin Thierry. Not only do we get racial por traits of St. Augustine, Luther, and Descartes, but the development of Europe seems to him a racial product: "The Celtic genius, which is that of individuality, has a profound affinity with the Greek genius. ... In op position to the Helleno-Celtic genius of a free person ality, the contrary spirit originating from Germany forces it to struggle and justify itself. The Middle Ages show the struggle and modern times the victory" (pp. 169, 183). The habit of race-labeling is fatally easy, and even in the later Michelet we come upon isolated examples of such thinking. Thomas à Becket, for example, is a true Saxon defending the liberties of Kent against the Nor man Henry II. (II, pp. 358, 363.) Louis XVI has a thor oughly German nature; Marie Antoinette a wholly French one. (XIX, 166 seq.) Balancing against these remarks his repeated denials of race-bias, it is only fair to conclude that, by the sig nificant date 1869, Michelet definitely adhered to the notion of fused races. The famous catalogue of elements that contributed to the identity of France is worth quot ing: "The French genius is thoroughly distinct from the Roman and from the Germanic genius; they cannot serve to explain it. . . . All the races of the world have contributed to the endowment of France. (I, p. 185.) "The base which took on all other impressions was the mobile Gaelic race. "The Iberians gave the hardness and cunning of the mountaineer spirit. "The Semitic nations gave the South of France its commercial-mindedness. "The stubborn Kymris . . . ancestors of our Bretons, are our builders of Carnac. . . . "The Belgae came from the north, the Gauls fol lowed . . . Civil law and order came in the train of the Roman legions . . . the Greek spirit awoke Gaul to herself: . . . Then came the Germans ... to second the work of the Church towards social organization." (I, pp. 186-189.) It cannot be said that Michelet, whose genius lay in a divinatory understanding and the widest human sym pathy, was in any sense the apostle of a narrow race- creed, but it is obvious that like many of his peers in France and elsewhere, he took the imprint of a current of thought that was stronger than any one mind, since it was the tendency of the whole age to relate political grievances to race-clichés. Writing about it a century later, Camille Jullian could say: "It was a fateful theory that was launched at that time, with the words 'race,' 'Latin race,' 'Germanic race,' 'Slavic race.' . . . From France it spread to Italy and Germany, both ready to receive it." ( Thierry et le Mouv. Hist, sous la Restaura tion, p. 12.) In Italy and Germany the Nordic myth was used prin cipally to strengthen the movement towards national unification, but in both countries it was held in check by the opposite fiction of the superior southern or Latin race. Abuse and contempt were bandied about between the antagonists until the two nations solved their prob lem of governmental unity, by which time the Nordic idea had achieved a broader base transcending the pro vincial or class limits within which it had first taken shape. In England, the corresponding movement towards "Saxonism" was almost unopposed. Associating Rome with Popery made it easy for patriots to find the roots of modern England exclusively in her Germanic past. For one thing, had not French and German scholars told her that English freedom, English power, the English gift of self-government were all a racial heritage from the Nordic tribes that repeatedly conquered Britain until 1066? For another, the thrill of discovering the neglected poetry, chronicles, and buried remains of the Saxon period carried scholars and publicists to a pitch of patri otic fervor unequaled since the days of the Armada. Kemble dedicated his work on the Saxons in England to Victoria with the words: "To the Queen's most Ex cellent Majesty—This history of the principles which have given her empire its pre-eminence among the na tions of Europe." The now famous adjective Anglo-Saxon, which re- fers to no historic tribe whatever, was invented to make evident the link between "the history of our childhood" and "the explanation of our manhood." Freeman, in a fit of continuous pride, introduced the fashion of Saxon- izing every name. The battle of Hastings became the battle of Senlac, in order to be twice accurate. The pages of history became dotted with names like Eadiveard instead of Edward and words suddenly sprouted anew the obsolete diphthongs and the sign for the two kinds of th in the language known as Anglo-Saxon. Carlyle had helped Germanism as a politico-racial creed with his Past and Present and Frederick the Great so that by the last quarter of the century it seemed no incongruity for John Richard Green to assert in The Making of Eng land, "with the landing of Hengest, English history be gins"; or for the distinguished historian of Constitutional law, Bishop Stubbs, to particularize the same feel ing: "It is to Ancient Germany that we must look for the earliest traces of our forefathers, for the best part of almost all of us is originally German; though we call ourselves Britons, the name has only a geographical significance. The blood that is in our veins comes from German ancestors." ( Lect. on Early Eng. Hist., p. 3.) In the light of this authoritative and confident his tory-teaching the popular association of national great ness with a given race-heritage is not difficult to under stand. When H. G. Wells was a young man the mood was quasi-universal. A few years more and it became an aggressively jingoistic belief in the minds led by Joseph Chamberlain or Cecil Rhodes. The latter saw, and made others see, in the words of Francis Thomp son: 1 . . . the Teuton and the Saxon grip Hands round the warded world, and bid it rock . . . He saw the three-branched Teuton hold the sides Of the round world, and part it as a dish. . . . And on this basis the Empire-builder's followers were insisting that his greatness lay in being the first British statesman whose imperialism was not of Empire but of Race. (W. T. Stead, Rhodes''s Last Will and Testament, p. 52.) Politics and race-theories occur too often in con junction for us not to conclude that under most condi tions the alliance is a natural, even a necessary one. The still dominant Nordic myth finds adherents in the most unexpected quarters, science and historical-mindedness appearing to be of no avail against its fascination. Originating in a pamphlet by the disaffected Roman Tacitus, the theory was nurtured in France through the 150 years of the monarchy by the disaffected nobles. Its first form there was the enmity of Franks and Gallo- Romans. After the Revolution, enriched with the dis coveries of Celticism, and reinforced by the political passions of liberals and nationalists, it achieved European scale. But it was not destined to stop with history-writ- 1 Ode on Cecil Rhodes. ing. It multiplied its appeals through literature and criti cism and added to its resources first physiology, then anthropology, and later evolutionism. Before touching on the later manifestations of race in politics, the biologi cal side of the theory must be placed in its proper set ting. Chapter 111. RACE AND ANTHROPOLOGY I Genera, orders, classes exist only in our imag inations. . . . There are only individuals. Na ture does not arrange her works in bunches, nor living beings in genera.— buffon, Histoire Naturelle ANTHROPOLOGY or the science of man is of fairly recent birth. Its emergence belongs somewhere within the latter half of the eighteenth century and coincides with the rise of the biological sciences. Anthropology is ordinarily given a double paternity. Buffon, the French naturalist, and Blumenbach, the German anatomist, are jointly or singly credited with having established the new discipline. In point of fact, these ascriptions are arbitrary. It would be easy enough to make anthropol- ogy go back to Hippocrates or start in the year 1910 with Franz Boas's Mind of Primitive Man. The ancients —Hippocrates, Herodotus, Aristotle, Pliny, Galen, and others—had noted certain striking differences in the physical appearance of various human groups and so may be said to have founded ethnology or science of peoples, the forerunner of modern anthropology. In re cent times, the first systematic division of mankind into races is that by Bernier in 1684. Seventeenth-century 51 52 race: a study in modern superstition physical science put a premium on neat systems that would parallel the orderliness of the Newtonian uni verse, and it was not long before the organic world was cast into such a mold. In 1738 the Swedish savant Lin naeus gave his Systema Naturae, with the species man at the top of the vertebrates, interestingly divided into four races with their physical and moral characteristics suc cinctly described. The eighteenth century gathered a wealth of new material from travelers and colonists all over the globe and shortly the science of ethnology merged with natural history and incipient biology to form a new compound to which may properly be given the name of anthropology. As practiced in the first half of the nineteenth cen tury, anthropology thus had behind it a double tradi tion. It was descriptive in the manner of Buffon and it was addicted to classifying in the manner of Linnaeus and Blumenbach. Modern writers, especially French writers, who want to prove that race-dogmas are all of German origin, blame the latter, who was first and foremost a distinguished anatomist, for having started the business of differentiating skulls as a means of race- classification. But Blumenbach himself had had predeces sors in this field. In 1764, Daubenton was measuring in degrees the position of the head on top of the spinal column and correlating the measure of that angle with the amount of will-power in the several races. Camper in 1786 measured the facial angle and thought the perfec tion of beauty in humans was to be computed by com parison with the standard of ioo°, which he believed he had found obtaining among the ancient Greeks. Once the idea had been made familiar, measuring be came an increasingly common occupation of natural scientists. Blumenbach, following Daubenton's use of geometrical projection, suggested his norma verticalis or "Blumenbach's View" of the skull, which was placed between the feet of the observer and, after examination from above, classed as oblong, round, and so forth, for purposes of determining the race to which it belonged. Gibson and Bell in England declared in 1809 that the posterior balance of the skull—its ability to rest on the posterior edge of the occipital hole and the inferior edge of the orbits—was a distinctive sign of the Negro race. Many workers along these lines were quietly preparing the day of "scientific anthropology," but for the first quarter of the century description rather than measure ment held the field. The usual division of races was into color-groups, which made of the Europeans (or Whites or Caucasians) a single race. The first important shift of interest from the color-division to what might be called the shape-division came in 1829 at the hands of the British physician W. F. Edwards, who has already been mentioned. Edwards, who was a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Paris, lived in that city and wrote in French his epoch-making work: Des caractères physi ologiques des races humaines considérées dans leur rap port avec rhistoire. Significantly enough, the work is in the form of a letter to Amédée Thierry, who had pub lished his History of the Gauls the year before, and it narrates the piece of field work by which Edwards ar rived at his conclusion that two distinct races dwell on French soil. Note first that Edwards was a man of sci ence, and second that these alleged races did not merely co-exist in France in the fifth century a.D .—that discov ery would have been no discovery at all—but that they still co-existed unmixed and recognizable in the nine teenth century. After giving credit to the brothers Thierry for intro ducing the factor of race into history, he cites the au thorities of the day on anthropology and goes on to assert the existence of "historical races" as distinguished from those already known to natural science. He is thinking here of Blumenbach's five-fold division of man kind by color, and suggesting that within one color- group "historical races" exist. He attempts to prove this fact by analogy with the persistence of physical charac teristics shown by the Jews. In France, according to Ed wards, the Franks who conquered Gaul, like the Nor mans who conquered England, were few in proportion to the native population. They consequently left vir tually no traces of their physique. Edwards's next point is of the utmost importance. He asserts that the form and proportions of the head con stitute the principal test of race. Stature and color of hair are also important but secondary. Methodically, he ex amines various regions of France, locating the Gauls, the Romans, and the Nordics. All these he groups under the two heads suggested by Amédée Thierry—the Gauls and the Kymri. The Gauls have round heads, medium stature, and rounded features. The Kymri are tall, with long heads and salient chins. Here are our modern tall long-skulled and short round-skulled races making their first bow before the public. Subsequent changes of costume in their later appearances will not alter their basic character. Edwards denies, however, that the long headed type is due to the Nordic invasions; rather, the invaders were absorbed owing to their small numbers and possible resemblance to an already existing group. He extends his observations to England, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, where the Mongolian Hun is re vealed to him by his low brow and thick neck. In North ern Italy he finds a "pure German population," spotting them by their manner of speech, in the same way that Mezzofante, whom he cites, discovered that modern English is descended from original Gallic by a compari son of pronunciations. How either knew the pronun ciation of peoples long extinct remains a mystery of a kind not uncommon in theories of race. Its significance here is that philology is being drawn in as the third part ner in the game of building up race-theories. Edwards concludes his survey of Europe with two perfectly sound observations: he predicts a great future for philological and anthropological speculations of the kind he is inaugurating, and he suggests that this new "science" will go farther into the mental correlates of racial differences by means of an "alliance between his torical science and physiology" (p. 129). What gave Edwards's physiological distinctions pecul iar force was the contemporary vogue of phrenology. This empirical science was made famous by Gall and Spurzheim, both competent anatomists, about the year 1800, and it numbered as adherents many distinguished minds, including Lavater, Balzac, and Blake, before merging into the later anthropology. Phrenology uses several postulates that make it a very respectable fore runner of race-thinking. It assumes that man possesses independent faculties, related to certain areas in the brain; that the size of the areas indicates the amount of the faculty, and that the outer skull corresponds suf ficiently to the inner brain to afford the observers a means of diagnosing individual character. At the height of its vogue Thomas Love Peacock ridiculed the idea in Headlong Hall , making Mr. Cranium say: "Every man's actions are determined by his peculiar views and those views ... by the organization of his skull. A man in whom the organ of benevolence is not developed can not be benevolent." In popular speech we still retain expressions like the "bump of locality" which go back to the heyday of phrenology. Exactly when that "science" became thor oughly discredited is hard to decide. 1 It might be truer magazine, The Phrenological Era, is still being published monthly at Bowerston, Ohio, as the "Organ of the Tope School of Phrenology ... in behalf of whatever concerns the welfare of mind and body." Vol. XXXII, No. 12, Dec., 1936. to say that it was superseded by a more imposing but no more reasonable jargon. Compare, for example, the satiri cal passage just quoted from Peacock and dated 1815 with the following bit from Arthur Conan Doyle, writ ten in 1902: "You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supraorbital development. ... A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum." ( The Hound of the Baskervilles.) True, the passage is from a work of fiction but the key sentence at least is not meant as satire and it re flects perfectly the thinking that an educated medical man like Doyle would naturally ascribe to another in a story full of realistic detail. What had happened between Peacock and Doyle was that the phrenological belief in man's separate faculties and in the indicative virtues of the skull had been joined with the obvious idea of the transmission of racial char acteristics from parent to offspring. It was therefore pos sible to do what Edwards had hoped for: to distinguish, within the white color-group, races differentiated by the shape of their skull. This particular step in the scientific method of race- classification was due to Anders Retzius, a Swedish savant, who announced in 1842 that he had found craniological differences between the skulls of the Finns, whom he held to be an indigenous race, and the Indo- European Swedes who were supposed invaders from Asia. These differences Retzius expressed in figures and these figures served him to divide skulls into the now famous classes of brachycephalic (broad skulls) and dolichocephalic (long skulls). His figures were obtained by dividing the long diameter of the skull into the short diameter. The quotient, multiplied by 100 to eliminate decimals, is called the cephalic index and presumably de termines the race to which the skull belongs. Not until 1852—ten years after his discovery—did Retzius assign fixed limits to his classification. There lay the crux of the problem: Where do the broad skulls divide from the long ones? The answers to that question will be found in Chapter VII, after a necessary glance has been cast upon two other reinforcements of the trend to racial theorizing: materialistic psychology and the theory of Evolution. II As the junction depends on the organization, disturbed junctions will derange the organiza tion . . . and so arises insanity. . . . Religion is another fertile cause of insanity.— spurzheim, Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, 1817 AMONG the assumptions listed as essential to phreno logical research, the first was to the effect that man possesses independent faculties related to certain areas in the brain. The phrenologists used, but did not invent, this notion, for it is a direct heritage from the eight eenth-century philosophers. The British tradition of em pirical philosophy going back to Locke and Hobbes, rests upon the belief that all sensations are drawn from experience, and all ideas the result of association among sense-impressions. Enlarging upon this mechanical no tion of the human mind, the French and English ma terialists of the end of the eighteenth century arrived at the idea of an exact correspondence between body and mind. The most impressive research done in this direc tion was the work of a school of French psychologists known as Idéologues or Sensationalists, who flourished —or rather, were kept from flourishing—during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Cabanis, Vicq d'Azyr, and De Stutt de Tracy were the leaders of this movement. Chiefly trained in medicine and the biological sciences, these men and their disciples produced a considerable body of work in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and evolutionism which in curred private and public condemnation as being "athe istical and materialistic." Forerunners of the Behaviorists, the Idéologues taught that psychology was explicable only in terms of physi ology. Cabanis concluded from his brain-studies that the mixing of races was the surest means of changing and improving human nature, and Draparnaud attempted to establish for that purpose an "ideological scale of the different races." In addition, Cabanis systematically ex tended his physiological psychology with the aid of ex- ? 6o race: a study in modern superstition periments upon animals, with researches into embry ology, and with data drawn from what we should call today abnormal psychology. Throughout his work, the connection between mind and body is a connection of cause and effect. Mind, in the honorific sense of Spirit or Divinity, is excluded. That is why the religious-minded Vicomte de Bonald condemned the ideas of Cabanis as "abject" (Rech. phiL, II, p. 289) and why Napoleon, seeking to make his peace with the Catholics, suppressed the Idéologue doctrines. That these were not crushed out is shown by their resurgence in the nineteenth century. Race-theorizing attests it, for the foundation of all "serious" race-beliefs is the conviction that mind is simply the correlate of physiological structure, and that any spiritual or intel lectual product may be explained genetically in terms of its physical origin. The influence exercised by the Idéologues can also be traced through persons. St. Simon, the Utopian socialist, probably received these teachings through Dr. Burdin and on them he based his prediction that when physiology becomes a positive science, phi losophy and history will likewise become sciences. That stage, which he saw just around the corner, he called Physicism. With respect to man, it defines the develop ment of the individual mind as a purely biological func tion. This is the source of Comte's Philosophie Positive which initiated modern sociology and it is the faith of all those who have tried to write history as if it were a science, down to Crane Brinton 2 in our own day. Furthermore, St. Simon drew a parallel between the habits of the individual in life and the prevailing attitude of historical races. For instance, the Egyptians' fondness for digging and building corresponds to infancy; the Greeks' love of music and the arts to puberty and early manhood, and so forth. Such speculations, innocent or unconvincing though they may seem, embody none the less the principle of physiological race-thinking. Other nineteenth-century figures had direct contact with the writings of Cabanis and his friends. The novelist Stendhal was an avid reader of De Stutt de Tracy. Mig- net, the historian, and Sainte-Beuve, the critic, have ac knowledged their obligations. Fourier, Schopenhauer, and Janet in philosophy, Hartmann and Bichat in psy chology, take many of the Ideologues' views as their starting points. The historians Fauriel, Mérimée, and Augustin Thierry were in touch with De Stutt de Tracy as late as 1821 and Buchez summed up in his charac teristically titled Introduction to the Science of His tory (1833) the complex of ideas and beliefs relevant to this study of race. Not only does Buchez betray the influence of the Sensationalists and St. Simon, but like wise that of the phrenologists Gall and Spurzheim whom he cites approvingly. He entitles two chapters "Social Physiology" and "Considerations on Individual Physi ology; its Application to Social Physiology." The actual 2 The Jacobins, An Essay in the New History, 1930, pp. 1-6. 6 2 race: a study in modern superstition "considerations" are frequently obscure and entirely a priori , but his book though not written to attract, enjoyed a surprising popularity, a second revised edition being called for in 1842, six years before its author became President of the Constituent Assembly of 1848. Nationalism and the doctrines of the State likewise received impetus from the philosophy of psychological determinism. Buchez was being metaphorical when he said that "a nation is an idea that has made itself a liv ing body" {qui s'est faite chair), but many were be ginning to take literally the notion that a race (the body) represented a unique idea (the nation or state) both of them coexistent through all eternity. 3 "The dif ference of races," said Hegel in the Philosophy of Mind, "is again a natural difference, that is, one regarding the natural soul"; and Kant as well as Herder, Fichte, and Fr. Schlegel tended to support similar views. For most philosophers of racial nationalism it did not matter whether spirit determined matter or mat ter determined spirit, but for a large group of believers the difference was of course all-important. A modern disciple of Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, has writ ten some plain words on the subject: "Nationalism also professes the belief that each nation has its mission in history. In this sense it is almost synonymous with ra cialism, and in this sense it is indeed a very dangerous 3 Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918) treats of cultures on just the same basis, though he starts with the idea rather than the body. error. ... To take nations in the sense of racial fami lies is materialistic and false." ( Opinions sur Maunas, 1926, p. 66.) How racialism and materialistic philosophies fell foni of the established religions is easily apparent and can be told in a few words. Ill But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient charles Darwin, Origin of Species ON the afternoon of August 2, 1830, the Genevese botanist Soret went to see Goethe as usual, but in a state of great agitation. The news of the July Revolution had just reached Weimar. "Tell me," cried Goethe as his friend entered, "what do you think of the great event? The volcano has broken out, everything is in flames, and it's no longer some thing going on behind closed doors!" "A dreadful affair!" replied Soret. "What else is to be expected in the circumstances and from such a Ministry, but that the reigning Family will be driven into exile?" "We do not seem to understand each other, my dear fellow," returned Goethe. "I am not speaking of those people. It is quite another question I have in mind. I 64 race: a study in modern superstition am speaking of the open break that has occurred in the Academy between Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire over a matter of the highest importance to science. . . . The thing is of the highest significance, and you cannot imagine what I felt on hearing the news of the sitting of July 19." ( Gespräche mit Eckermann, III, p. 240.) The open break between Baron Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire was over the question of the Creation, or as it was put in the debates of the Academy, of the "unity of organic life." Was there one human race or were there many? If there were many, as descriptions of re mote primitive peoples seemed to indicate, then the proc ess of differentiation must be explained somehow. Two explanations were possible. Either each race had a sepa rate pair of ancestors, which implied numerous acts of creation in the beginning of life; or from a single origi nal pair, Adam and Eve, the earth had been peopled. If so, climate must account for the present observable dif ferences. The latter school of anthropologists called themselves monogenists and the former polygenists. Not before the full vogue of skull-measurement did the quar rel between these two groups cease, and it ceased only insofar as the old terms were made obsolete by the skull- nomenclature on the one hand, and the Darwinian idea of species on the other. Before skull-anthropology, the "races" of mankind were the groups that one still learns about in grammar-school geographies. Color of skin, ap pearance of hair and features were the distinguishing marks, whether one followed the five-fold classification of Blumenbach into Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American, and Malayan, or whether one preferred a finer and larger classification following Desmoulins or d'Omalius d'Halloy. Goethe was particularly interested in questions of morphology and evolution and his comment to Soret on receiving the news of the Academy debate evinced a partisanship shared by many of his scientific and lay contemporaries. A desire to explain the forms of natural life in materialistic terms had, between 1750 and 1800, given rise to various theories of evolution: Bonnet, Maupertuis, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and finally La marck, suggested schemes of increasing ingenuity and complexity to account for the similarities among living beings. Although the tendency to prove similarity and evolution might suggest that scientists would try to minimize the differences among men, the fact is that evolution and the belief in separate races contradict each other only in part. As so often happens, the confusion of ideas lies chiefly in the definition of terms. In the classical language of Linnaeus, animal species represent groups that can be distinctly set apart one from another and that will not produce fertile offspring when crossed. Varieties, on the contrary, show less distinct and less stable differences and do reproduce indefinitely by cross-breeding. Thus the species Homo sapiens is divided into four varieties with their criteria: Homo Americanos— Tenacious,, contented, free; ruled by custom. Homo Europaeus— Light, lively, inventive; ruled by rites. Homo Asiaticus— Stern, haughty, stingy; ruled by opinion. Homo Afer— Cunning, slow, negligent; ruled by caprice. This was already far removed from the simple Bibli cal account of the human races descended from Ham, Shem, and Japhet, but it does not conflict with Scrip ture in the sense that it leaves the human race one and undivided. About the creation it says and implies noth ing. Questioning the account in Genesis began in ear nest with the increase of knowledge concerning primitive peoples which was the result of exteñsive travel and ex ploration during the latter half of the eighteenth cen tury. Australia and its natives became known to Eu ropeans about 1770. La Pérouse, Bougainville, and Cook belong to the same period; and to it also the theory of the noble savage, so important in the growth of evolu tionary sociology and so generally misunderstood in our own day. The result was a widespread curiosity con cerning man in nature and his ultimate biological origins. The varieties of red, yellow, white, and black were themselves found to contain sub-varieties. How could they be accounted for without special acts of creation? Was there a parallel between human and animal forms? Buffon compiled his great Natural History (1749 seq.), giving added impetus to the study of organic forms and embodying in it a cautions and purposely ambiguous theory of evolution. In England, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and in Germany Goethe, were puzzling over the prob lems of morphology and all gravitating towards the notion that animal forms might have sprung from a few prototypes. But any evolutionary theory had to solve a three-fold problem: (1) How to arrange animal species in the order of their evolutionary similarity. (2) How to account for the change of form that would make one type into another. (3) How to explain the apparent fixity of actual living species. This is not the place to review the numerous answers oifered to these questions. What must be pointed out is that race is doubly involved in any theory of evolution. If species do not really exist, then there are in the world only individuals who temporarily occupy a place in the hierarchy of nature and who may still be evolving towards other forms. But it may also be that the agent in this evolution is the adaptation of certain hereditary forms to environment, therefore certain groups (races) would be especially favored and perpetuated. From this to the assertion that the white race or Homo Europaeus is the finest racial product of evolution is but a step. In such a view the world would be seen as peopled by a large number of diverse races at various stages of evolu tion reflecting their own inner powers of adaptation. Race, once again, would be a materialistic agent deter mining the various degrees of civilization, and so dis pensing with Providence. Hence the great significance of the debate in Paris which lined up in one camp both religious and scientific orthodoxy against the new evolu tionary heretics. Cuvier was the defender of the tradi tional view of monogeny and Geoffroy St. Hilaire was making the frontal attack against the entrenched posi tion. Cuvier won the day, but the breach had been made. A remarkable aspect of this discussion is that it split liberalism and conservatism two ways. Obviously the liberal, or indeed the radical view to take, was that the Biblical account was mere poetry and that there were in fact many races. But it happened that, simultaneously with the religious issue, liberals all over Europe were fighting the battle of Negro slavery. One of the best arguments for the essential wickedness of slavery had always been that the Negroes were our brothers, an integral part of the human race, with feelings and poten tialities or "souls" in every way similar if not equal to those of the whites. The unorthodox view of the polyg- enists laid them open to the charge of condoning slavery by admitting that there might be on this earth differently constituted breeds of men, some of whom were inferior and thus the natural servants of the others. The abolition of slavery in the British possessions in 1834 and in the United States in 1861-5 killed the quarrel rather than settled the argument. But the ques tion of inequality survived on a larger scale, as can be seen in Gobineau, 4 owing to the scramble of the New 4 Essay on the Inequality of Races (1853-5), discussed in the next chapter. Imperialism for colonies among the so-called backward peoples. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Evolu tion had become established, even popular, with the writings of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Huxley. Monogeny and polygeny had been merged into a new doctrine that was not in reality more conclusive on the race-issue. Darwin's book is entitled The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Survival of Favored Races in the Strug gle for Life, but, on the one hand, the theory of evolu tion asserted that all forms of animate life were related to one another by way of generation; and on the other, the races or varieties were not defined or accounted for, save by a mysterious process that Darwin calls Variation. It was possible therefore for the monogenists under new names to say that not only were all human beings brothers but that they were brothers to all other organic forms; and equally tenable for their opponents to assert that races having been established, the struggle for exist ence among them was ever widening the gap by increas ing the inequalities. It was good Social Darwinism for the white man to call the amoeba, the ape, and the Tasmanian his brother; it was equally good Practical Darwinism to show that the extinction of the Tasmanian by the white colonists of Australasia was simply a part of the struggle for life leading to the survival of the favored races by natural selection. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church was bending every 7o race: a study in modern superstition effort to uphold the monogenistic doctrine on grounds of both humanitarianism and revelation. The bishop of Montpellier, writing in 1857 to the Deans and Professors of the University declared: . . without entering into the scientific examination of such or such a question of physiology, but on the sole certainty of our dogmas, we can judge of any hypothesis, most such being only anti- Christian engines rather than serious conquests over the secrets and mysteries of nature. It is a dogma that man was formed and fashioned by the hand of God. It is therefore false, heretical, contrary to the dignity of the Creator and an offense to his masterpiece to say that man constitutes the seventh species of ape. . . . Hereti cal also to say that humankind is not descended from a single couple and that one can discover as many as Pwelve distinct races." (Quoted in Tyndall, Frag, of Science, II, p. 218.) To this day, the church in its missions and in its in tellectual organizations, such as Aucam, 5 stands as the proponent of monogenism, the result of which has un doubtedly been to further descriptive anthropology while asserting a priori the unity of the human race. At the same time, the church adopts necessarily a strict posi tion on dogma and cannot consider infidels or heathen its spiritual brethren until they have adopted the Catholic religion, just as the white imperialist or the white scien tist is usually unable to consider the Kaffir his brother until the Kaffir has taken on European clothing, Euro- 5 Association Universitaire Catholique pour l'Aide aux Missions. (See the report of its first Congress at Louvain, April 12-14, ï93°-) pean habits of work, or produced art on European models. A striking instance of such judgments on a single standard occurred after 1867 when the Japanese west ernized their nation. Almost overnight the tone of con tempt towards them changed to one of surprised admira tion. The island people began to be distinguished from the Chinese and instead of being described as indolent and backward "orientals," they were given a separate status much closer to the Aryan whites. In our day opposition to German race-propaganda led the Austrian episcopate to reiterate the Catholic dogma: "Humanity is a single family based on justice and love. We therefore condemn the National-Socialist race-mania which leads necessarily to hatred and con flict. . . (Vienna, Dec. 21, 1933.) The ensuing quarrel in Germany proper between Hitler and the Catholics attests the same antagonism between racial and religious dogmas, which in turn has favored the political alliance between National-Socialism and Nordic paganism. 6 But long before Hitler, the union into one force of all these factors—polygenism, imperial ism, Nordic heathenism, historical determinism, and racial discrimination—had taken place by mere propin quity and had found expression in the works of a man, a Frenchman, the Count Arthur dé Gobineau, to whom we must next turn our attention. 6 Ludendorff is reported to have said at a celebration in his honor: "The Christian faith is not apt to bring about a regeneration of the German people as it is not fitted for our race." Chapter IV. GOBINEAU I We do not come from the ape but we are rap idly getting there. —gobineau RECENT writers who have taken a stand against Ger man racialism have usually looked for a villain at the root of the evil and they have had little trouble in find ing one. The Germans themselves have pointed to Arthur de Gobineau as their master and inspirer. Un fortunately, Gobineau's famous Essay on the Inequality of Races, published in the middle of the last century, is one of those books, like Marx's Capital and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, that everybody talks about but never reads. It is the common fate of two-volume works of erudition, but it does not seem to prevent their influence from working, from spreading, and from generating powerful myths. Gobineau's Essay has unquestionably done these things, but it is a grave mistake to regard him on that account as a narrow-minded snob or a fanatical theorist. He must answer for much, but he is not the villain sought for by his indignant accusers. The Count, in fact, is not only personally charming, but he is without doubt a first-rate intellect. Granted that he furnished a host of lesser writers with race-ideas and convenient clichés, he himself was superior to his 72 own doctrine and he applied it with the playfulness of the genius fascinated by ideas. Before the end of his life, Gobineau had supplemented, if not actually supplanted, his race-theory of history with the notion of an intel lectual aristocracy, and his race-prejudice with a Utopian desire that Plato or Jefferson might not have disavowed. His wavering between Nordic racialism and an aristoc racy of brains is not hard to account for. The Count de Gobineau, born in 1816, belongs to that second generation of Romanticists who absorbed as pre cocious adolescents the dull atmosphere of the Restora tion Monarchy whilst they dreamt of a life on a gen erous, even heroic, scale. "There are two things in the world," he wrote to his father in 1839, "that interest me and for which I am ready to become a martyr: my love and my poetry. But when I uttered a word of this to you formerly you got angry and called me romantic." (July 22, 1839.) Gifted young men of the middle class threw them selves into the struggle for liberalism, hoping for more freedom from an extension of the Revolutionary princi ples. Others, bound by aristocratic family traditions, made the opposite choice, believing that it was liberalism and impending democracy that were stifling the élite. Gobineau was among the latter, and his choice is but another manifestation of the rift between the Two Frances. Last scion of a line of well-to-do bourgeois from Bordeaux, Gobineau received the aristocratic de from an indifferent father but the full significance of the noble particle was made clear to him by an erratic uncle who had been a royalist conspirator. In some ways, the youth's early circumstances remind one of another great Nordicist, also from Bordeaux, the Baron de Montesquieu. Both were aristocrats by temperament, wits by avoca tion, travelers by choice, and systematic historians by determination. Had Gobineau been vain enough to realize the kinship he might have called his essay L'Esprit des Races. The two works, separated by almost exactly a century, fairly represent the change in the general atti tude of mankind towards science and history. Montes quieu makes geography and climate the conditioning factors in history. The physical world of matter explains the mind and the institutions of men. But Gobineau comes after the "biological revolution." He consequently finds in the physical nature of men themselves inherent race-factors that explain men's minds and institutions. Before he arrived at this broad statement and sub stantiated it with an abundance of historical matter, the Count had gained much practical experience in journal ism, politics, and diplomacy. He began his literary career under the July Monarchy in that mood of revolt against petty bourgeois conventions that the heroes of Balzac and Stendhal typify. Gobineau soon formed with a few kindred souls a group who called themselves the Scelti (the chosen) or the Cousins of Isis, and who, humorously aware of their own solemnity, wrote earnestly in behalf of aristocratic freedom. Like the elder Romanticists, they championed Greek independence, they took up oriental studies and toiled at epic poems, novels, and five-act tragedies. This lively struggle against his milieu was for Gobineau a continuation of the fitful tenor of his early education, first under the guidance of a German Hegelian tutor, then at the college of Lorient in Brittany. The results of this training were on the whole good, French biographers to the contrary notwithstanding. He derived from it a love of travel, a knowledge of German (then as rare in France as it was in England), and an acquaint ance with racial and artistic Celticism at that time in full revival. Never quite at one with his eccentric family, Gobineau united in himself before his thirtieth year tendencies which, though logically contradictory, were none the less psychologically of a piece. A hatred of humanity and of Christian morals was combined with artistic individualism. Both these led to a passion for the Renaissance period, as strong and as keen as Stendhal's, and a corresponding contempt for the pseudo-democracy of his own day. It is not therefore surprising to find Gobineau in his earliest literary criticism battling for the Romanticists and seeing in Hugo, Stendhal, Lamartine, George Sand, Mérimée, and Lamennais voices of his own desires and despair. In 1848 Gobineau was momentarily tempted by the possibility of an aristocratic republic. With Louis de Kergolay he founded the Revue Provinciale to preach the administrative decentralization of France—the old dream of Boulainvilliers and the revolutionary Federal ists. Gobineau's hopes were soon dashed, and as Cabinet Secretary to Alexis de Tocqueville in 1849 he became anti-republican, then Bonapartist, finally an indomitable oppositionist to whatever government was in power. This did not prevent his being an excellent diplomat entrusted from 1849 to 1877 with various missions that took him to Switzerland, Germany, Persia, Greece, Newfoundland, Brazil, and Sweden. Before we judge too harshly of Gobineau's seemingly volatile political allegiance, we must recall that the nine teenth century was not in fact the stream of solid lava cleft at two or three points that historiography tends to make it. It was a period of chaos, like our own, like every period. It was full of dramatic turns and shocking events in even greater degree than ours, if only because the pace was new. The political evolution of a Gobineau, a Coleridge, a Victor Hugo, or a Mazzini therefore de mands more sympathetic attention than the historian, sitting in judgment at his typewriter away from the con fusion and the smoke of contemporaneousness, is willing to give it. Gobineau, like his other spiritual ancestor, the Count Henri de Boulainvilliers, felt born out of his time, but it would be an error to think that his passion for the Past, the Future, or the Elsewhere was an escape or a retreat from the Present. He belongs in that regard with the Romanticists. Perhaps no generation of men since the Renaissance has lived so intensely and perceptively, nor made so much poetry and truth out of a Present that was out of joint. Like them a poet at heart, despite his wretched versification, Gobineau's literary output was born from conviction. His critical and political articles, his novels and tales, his travel books and oriental studies, his letters and his sculpture, his diplomatic work, his friendships and his life, must command the respect of anyone acquainted with them, who is not also blinded by narrow patriotism or bewildered by the versatility of a genuine artist. It is entirely true that this versatility leads Gobineau to contradict himself on important points in the course of the forty volumes he has left us. But those contradic tions, as with greater dialecticians than he, always have their explanation in the context. They must be held signs of honesty, rather than weakness, of mind. Gobineau had the realist's eye and he was stating no more than the truth when he said that in studying a new people he "repudiated any true or false idea he might have had of their superiority." If inconsistency resulted, the fault lies with an unmanageable race-doctrine, not with the man observing history or life. Now what is Gobineau's race-theory? It boils down to three ideas: special race-characteristics, mixture of blood, and decadence. Gobineau starts with the three fold division of mankind into white, yellow, and black. To the first he ascribes all the noble qualities of man hood, leadership, energy, superiority. The yellow races have stability and fertility, and the black are endowed with sensuality and the artistic impulse. At this point Gobineau's scheme displays an interesting and refresh ing novelty. It is only when two races mix, he says, that civilization occurs. Art and government are the signs of civilization and no single race can produce these by itself. But civilization leads to more and more mixing of "inferior blood" with that of the ruling caste, so that the "great race" is inevitably bastardized and decadence follows. What Gobineau is really doing is to offer an answer to the ever fascinating question of why civilizations rise and fall. Race is that answer, and one is forced to admit that Gobineau is so far a good historian that he sees all the European nations as products of the interpénétration of cultures. As a prophet he is again sound in thinking that nothing is going to stop the process of "mixing." It is when three races are discovered as the basic ele ments in the mixture that the non-racialist historian must take issue with Gobineau. Pessimist and fatalist as he is because of the "inevitability of race," he deserves a cer tain respect for rejecting the hope of a "pure race" preserving its "blood" intact. For him—and this is the result of Aryan philology in the manner of Prichard or Max Müller—the primitive Aryas, who were the pro genitors of the great white race, have left very few pure specimens in our midst. What happened to the great majority was contamination by yellow and Negro blood. The Semites are Negroid and the Semites have infected the whole Mediterranean basin with their "nigridity." That is why the so-called Latin nations, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, are a decadent, slavish, and worthless stock: they are thoroughly semitized, melanized (fiékcç: black). Gobineau paints us the portrait of these un fortunates with the colors of his own disgust for democ racy, servility, corruption, and universal mediocrity. Obviously, Gobineau, reversing the usual process, starts with a desire for the truth about a great historical question, and he ends by finding a confirmation of his hypothesis in the contemporary scene. At his narrowest, Gobineau is actuated by fairly broad and defensible motives—a genuine passion for art, for selectivity, for energy and devotion to causes transcending self or na tional interest. The vehemence of his racial denuncia tions is never ignorant fanaticism, and one comes to feel about him what Swift said of himself—that he hated the human race en masse, but truly loved Tom, Dick, and Harry. The proof of this comparison is that when Gobineau was sent as minister to Persia in 1856, after the publica tion of the Essay, he acclimatized himself readily and conceived a love for the "semitized" and "melanized" Persians inconsistent with his written profession of faith. His work on the history and religion of the Persians breathes sympathy and understanding in a measure that few writers wholly innocent of racial bias could achieve. His next diplomatic post took him to Greece, for whose people and art he had conceived an aversion ever since becoming aware of their semitization in Macedonian and Hellenistic times. But, once on the spot, Gobineau ob serves, absorbs, and grows enthusiastic. In Newfoundland and Sweden, despite some frankly acknowledged disappointments of his racial forecasts, he found himself completely in tune with his surroundings. Only in Brazil did he show intractability. He hated the nigridized race, even though he became a close friend and confidant of the Emperor Pedro, hardly a pure Aryan. But one suspects that Gobineau's distaste for Brazil was due to the climate, which made him suffer, and to the political rebuke of his appointment there, which made his proud honesty and clear conscience suffer even more. Gobineau's ideas on France itself have made a number of his biographers justly call him a continuator of Boulainvilliers and Montesquieu. He is a Nordicist like them, with the added power that had been packed since their day into the new adjective Aryan. Racially, says Gobineau, there are in France only a few Aryan Nordics left; the rest are a Gallo-Roman mob whose chief in stinct is envy and revolution, 1 and whose highest taste in politics or in art is the circus. Using the word race in an honorific sense, Gobineau declares that these Latins are anything but a race. What has happened is of course the hopeless semitization of the breed, with the result that mediocrity is everywhere in power. Their misman agement of government, their corruption, was at no time more evident to the Count than during the war of 1870. On the conduct of that war he wrote a bitter but ex- 1 The Count unfortunately had to celebrate his own birthday on the 14th of July. ceedingly realistic pamphlet which he himself considered his best work, the fruit of twenty-one years' observation and reflection. The severity of its strictures, which will be detailed elsewhere, has prevented many French racial ists, otherwise in agreement with Gobineau, from avow ing his influence; and it was precisely this brand of un intelligent patriotism which was abhorrent to Gobineau. He had traveled too far and knew Germany too well to believe, much less to be willing to repeat, the absurdities current during the Franco-Prussian War. Patriotism, he opined, was a tyrannical invention of the Semitic race, a conclusion which, if true, would greatly embarrass those French nationalists of our day who combine rabid patriotism with anti-Semitism. Shortly before his death Gobineau further qualified his opinion. "One must love one's country soberly, to be able to forgive it much. One must love everything in the world in the same way for the same reason, that everything needs great in dulgence." (Catal. Expos. Strasbourg, p. 4.) This is not the utterance of an anti-patriot, but of a realist. Whether motivated by pessimism or by realism, Gobineau was among the first to term the Latin races decadent and to sound a warning against the yellow peril. Already in the Essay, the hordes of silent yellow men are pictured as bound to engulf the decreasing race of whites precariously perched on that peninsular tip of the Asiatic continent we call Europe. The Count was perhaps not so much inconsistent about the East as fascinated and frightened by it. As an early orientalist and philologian, he had translated cuneiform inscrip tions, but he also wrote articles against the Asiatic men ace. He was attracted by magic and talismans, by fatal ism and the ascetic life, so much so that during his own lifetime theosophic circles gave his works ready circula tion and quiet renown. But he had moments of revulsion. In Scandinavia, swayed by the associations of the lan guage and the surroundings, his orientalism fell away from him and he returned with zest to the Norse my thology admired in the Essay, and which his new ac quaintance with Richard Wagner made doubly fresh and attractive. He sculpted a Walküre, yet there was a Buddha nearby swathed in damp cloths. Behind this mixed love and fear on the philosophical plane, Gobineau was moved by definitely practical con siderations. In 1867 he writes to his friend Adalbert von Keller, "The Orient is our great enemy: the danger began with the death of Alexander." He had seen in Persia the process of religious and racial semitization bringing about urban democracy and thought he saw a close parallel between the progress of Proudhon's philosophical anar chism in Europe and the spread of the economic- evangelical movement known as Bab-ism in the Middle East. The East, history suggested to him, always kills the civilizations that conquer it, hence the grave danger of European imperialism in- Asia. As the struggle of the powers shifted more and more to the Eastern checker board, awareness of the yellow peril grew in Gobineau's mind, and in an article dated 1880-81 that did not reach the public until after his death, 2 he reviewed the gradual encroachment of "Semitic blood" in Europe from Greece to Scandinavia, analyzed with much insight the Anglo- Russian conflict in Asia, and predicted a world upheaval as the result of imperialism. Imperialism spelled danger to him because it augmented race-mixture, and race- mixture "having gone so far in the modern world can only accelerate the evil to the final extremity." The panicky doctrine of the early 1900's clarioned forth by the newspapers and the German Emperor is here in more than embryonic form, as is also the chief point of modern prophecies like Henri Massis's Defense de l'Occident. To reconcile the Count's writings with his tolerant behavior needs really no legerdemain. Gobineau was first and foremost a cosmopolitan spirit curious of the world. He belonged to that small but permanent class of French men who travel and who, doing it with their eyes and minds open, never make the mistake of supposing that the Alps, the Channel, and the Pyrenees are the outer edges of the civilized world. This class has somehow to overcome almost the whole weight of French habits and opinions, which accounts for their unpopularity at home. Such men learn foreign languages, appreciate for eign cultures, and do not wither and die when outside the limits of their native Paris or parish. Historically, they often occur in bunches: the French explorers of the Renaissance, the eighteenth-century philosophers, the 2 Ironically enough, in the "semitized" pages of the Revue du Monde Latin, 1885, pp. 397 seq. Romanticists, and in modern times a goodly number of young diplomats and colonialists, who continue a very real tradition that has been falsely obscured by hasty generalizations. 3 It has been said that Gobineau was anti-nationalistic and anti-patriotic (despite an effective devotion to the interests of his country) because he owed allegiance only to his race—the Aryan-Nordic type. The remark is superficially true but misleading. Gobineau found very few true Nordics wherever he went. His son-in-law, the Baron von Guldencrone, was one in his eyes and that made Gobineau, according to the bride, the happiest man at the wedding. But Germany had scarcely more Aryans than Northern France. Sweden was heavily stocked with a short, round-headed population very similar to the mongrel French. The Count himself was brown-haired and there remains an insoluble ambiguity topped by a paradox—so often the case in questions of race—about the color of his eyes. One of his earliest disciples among the younger generation, the historian Albert Sorel, refers categorically to the Count's "handsome, mocking blue eyes." ( Notes et Portraits , p. 232, and Le Te?7ïps, March 22, 1904.) Another description, furnished by the friend and companion of Gobineau's last years, Madame de la Tour, tells us of his light chestnut hair and golden-brown eyes, which she apparently rendered-with fidelity in the portrait she painted of him. The paradox comes in when we find Gobineau himself requiring the possession of 3 See, for example, the article by Abbé Ernest Dimnet, Literary Digest, Dec. 23, 1933, p. 15. blond hair and blue eyes as the sign of Aryan race: "And all the Merovingian tribe displaying its ancient vigor, A noble crowd with blond tresses flowing on broad shoulders White as the snow at the poles, and dazzling with its blue eyes . . . Said to me: 'Dost know that heaven belongs to the strong-armed?' " —Paradis de Beowulf Despite the difference between this description and his own features, Gobineau truly believed that he was just such a Nordic-Aryan, descended through Nor man stock from Ottar Jarl, a Viking hero originating from one of the Skaeren, an islet in the North Sea. Stand ing on this pine-fringed rock, Gobineau felt a sudden mystic conviction that here his race had begun, but this poetic vision, or naïve nonsense, as one chooses, need not obscure a very real element in Gobineau's thought, namely, the belief in nobility of mind which he held as sincerely as that in nobility of birth. In the last analysis aristocracy is for him an individual and not a racial matter. He says so, ambiguously perhaps, in The Pleiads: "Whoever finds the qualities you speak of hung round his neck from birthj that one without the least doubt has received in his blood through whatever lineage, superior virtues, the sacred merit that one can see shining in him. . . . He is a 'son of kings.' " But in a later, less fanciful work, in which he discusses democracy, he asserts categorically the existence of "a small number of chosen spirits ( esprits d'élite) who, to the honor of man kind, live in all periods and places, in all milieux, and who by reason of their very excellence defy all classifi cations; they belong in truth to no class or order but that of select natures ( natures d'élite), no matter how humble their condition, and they cannot therefore pass any more as representatives of the working classes [than of the upper orders]." ( Nachgelassene Schrift., II, p. 127.) That conviction, similar to Balzac's, probably would account for the paradox of his hair and eye color, as for that of several of his fictional heroes and heroines who are brunettes with ancestries as doubtfully Nordic as the Count's own. 4 4 Gobineau belonging to a family of merchants from Southern France, hence "semitized" at one time or another, apparently had a genuine English ancestor in the fifteenth century who helped bridge the missing link in the genealogical fiction elaborated in the History of Ottar Jarl. The whole matter is of slight importance except for the ever-interesting question of the "quality of belief" that a fine intellect accords to myths of its own manufacture. Newton's theology, Auguste Comte's late mysticism, Nietzsche's Polish nobility, Goethe's self-fictionizing, and similar manifestations of the creative power, have not been studied with sufficient understanding by critics for whom, in general, whatever cannot be verified in court records is either vanity or lunacy. A pragmatic approach suggests that a belief of this sort is accessory to other functions in the man's mind. At any rate, Gobineau is not the first nor the last man to take pleasure in a galloping genealogy. A visit to the Theodore Roosevelt Museum in New York City is instructive in this regard, and we shall find, in the following pages, how often artists and thinkers choose to belong to this race or that. I knew him. . . . One was aware that he had written some books, but no one had read them. . . . And so he was a genius? How CUrioUS! —anatole france on gobineau TO understand a man's mind in its strength and weak ness is one thing; to measure the effects and distortions of his thought, is another, far more difficult task. Gobineau is in himself a sympathetic character, but there is no doubt possible about his being responsible for a particular conjunction of influential race-beliefs. Aryan, Germanic, inferior and superior races, race-mixture, de- generescence, semitization, and nigridization are ideas, are words that he dinned into the minds of his contempo raries. The habit of quotation-picking among scholars and the echolalia of publicists have done the rest. To make Gobineau solely responsible, as certain detractors have done, or entirely uninfluential, as some French critics still persist in doing, is to go against the facts. During his own lifetime, the Essay was read by at least a score of notables—Renan, Taine, Nietzsche, Wag ner, de Quatrefages, Schopenhauer, Philip von Eulen- burg, Vanderkinder, Hans von Wolzogen, Jacques de Boisjolin, Viollet-le-Duc, Mérimée, Broca, Paul de Ré- musat, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Albert Sorel, Roget de Belloguet, Comte de Leusse, Baron Prokesch-Osten, Jules Mohl (President of the Asiatic Society), and the Ameri- can anthropologist Charles D. Meigs, who boasted of having read the book ten times, and who regarded it as a kind of gospel to be preached. In effect, these men did more than read this or later works by Gobineau. They were so struck by the idea of racialism as the key to history, or so aptly confirmed in their thoughts on cognate subjects, that they adopted the system and made it within a half-century the common property of men who had read at first hand neither Gobineau, nor Taine, nor Renan, nor anyone else. It is a mistake to confuse publisher's sales and salon popularity with influence. Many a work that is on everybody's tongue for two whole seasons drops like a plummet into oblivion and dies with its own ripples; whereas a work like the Essay, if read by half a dozen persons will—provided they be the right half-dozen—live and act long before its author's name becomes a household word. Moreover, though the Essay is in its way a "technical" book, the same general ideas are so easily discoverable in Gobineau's fiction and travel-notes that it is impossible not to see in these vari ous sources the cause of much scholarly race-theorizing in the manner of Renan or Taine, and of nearly all the popular dogmatizing of the casual racialists. The dates of the Essay and of Renan's manuscript on Semitic Languages seem to show that Gobineau merely reinforced the distinction Renan made between the "objective" Aryan and the "subjective" Semite. But that a feudal Germanic constitution was the primitive form of the old Iranian government is too special a notion for Renan to have come upon coincidently after Gobineau had voiced it in his T hre e Years in Asia. We know that Renan carefully annotated Gobineau's Essay for his own use, though he never publicly acknowledged his many debts to the Count. Neither did Taine, who in public only smiled at the diplomat's "paradoxes," yet brought out a very complete theory of race applied to literature in 1863; nor did Nietzsche, whose sister read the Essay aloud to him and testified after her brother's death that he had been profoundly struck by Gobineau's views. As early as 1856, Pott had given in a work of his own a synopsis of the French writer's thesis, which may have been the start of Gobineau's fortunes in Germany. At any rate, some twenty years later, Wagner, as was his wont when any fresh system swam into his ken, sat down to the composition of a Gobinian Essay combin ing anti-Semitism, love of renunciation and renunciation of love, blatant Germanism and a Nietzschean view of Greek tragedy. He met Gobineau and finding pleasure in his witty conversation and musical tastes, fêted him at Wahnfried. One wonders whether in these delightful talks of which we hear, the diplomatic Count mentioned his conviction that music is the native gift of the Negro race to white civilization. Did Wagner find the idea compatible with his recurrent faith in a German musical monopoly? Certainly he must have preferred being told, as he was, that the Ring embodied the quintessence of Gobineau's principles of German race-superiority. There was throughout an unconscious play on words, for by German, Gobineau never meant Deutsch, and Wagner seldom meant anything else. Nothing, however, arose to strain the friendship. The pages of the Bayreuth er Blätter were opened to the French writer, Hans von Wolzogen became his devoted disciple and press-agent, and Wagner sealed the bond of race-fraternity by inscribing his com plete prose works to the Count with the following un translatable doggerel: Das wäre ein Bund, Normann und Sachse, Was da noch gesund, Dass das blühe und wachse! Through his appreciative Wagnerism and his personal relations with the Master, Gobineau was enabled to reach directly or indirectly the younger generation of writers who established his fame in Germany. Schemann, H. S. Chamberlain, and Eulenburg were his earliest apostles. It was from the pen of the last named that Gobineau received the only enthusiastic summary of a life of thought and toil upon his leaving it. But it was only the beginning. Even if Nietzsche had not privately admitted his sense of loss at never having met Gobineau, one could have guessed from internal evidence that the Count's ideas had struck fertile ground. Then, too, Nietzsche knew his Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer had also read the Essay, and read it well, to judge from the citation in the Par erga. The even greater affinity between Gobineau and Nietzsche is at once apparent. A common admira tion for Stendhal meant in reality a common love of the Renaissancemensch— bold, active, artistic, and morally beyond good and evil. Nietzsche was not yet born when Gobineau began to discard the Christian ethic and to admire barbarian life, but with this cult of the ego a contradictory orientalism shared Gobineau's soul. The phenomenon is so common among nineteenth-century poets that it may be unfair to attribute it in Nietzsche to a reading of Gobineau. Goethe had seemed equally at home on the Brocken and with Confucius. Wagner, after the Ring, thought of writing a music drama about Sakya Muni, the Aryan noble turned tribune of the people, and the design became the mystic Parsifal. So Gobineau during his Brazilian period was for renounc ing all earthly ambition, adopting brahmanic asceticism, and we find the heroes of his new works, Amadis, Beowulf, turning out to be chaste protagonists who refuse carnal love precisely like Parsifal. Nietzsche, in turn, could set up Zarathustra and Dionysus as his idols and yet preach the life of the blond beast destined for Valhalla. Between Gobineau and Nietzsche, the simi larity in contradiction goes even further. Gobineau's championship now of race and now of the superior indi vidual is paralleled in Nietzsche by the two different types of supermen he longs for. Up to 1883, Nietzsche's ideal may be defined as the Romanticist genius; there after, starting with the fourth book of Zarathiistra, his ideal is the blond beast of prey, that is to say, a racial in place of an individual type. Both men oscillated between their two predilections for the barbarian with his pagan vigor, and for the highest type of cultured man— Gobineau's "son of kings," Nietzsche's "good Euro pean." Stendhal had swung within the same arc of pref erence, and in cruder form, the modern Nazi ideal wobbles between identical poles. Again, bound up with the issue of race as these ideals are, they strike in Nietzsche the same splitting obstacle that makes Gobineau perpetually contradict himself. In the Essay he clearly asserts the race-mixture theory that semitization is the cause of degenerescence. In The Pleiads, in Manfredine, in Ottar Jarl , and elsewhere the chosen men, the sons of kings, maintain the purity of the "great race" because its essence cannot be lost. It is an inalien able heritage that descends with the blood. But if that is so, then race-mixture is either impossible or else ought to endow all the resulting mongrels with the imperish able qualities of the great race. In Nietzsche, the blond beast must keep his strain pure, but the good European must not be exclusively Germanic; in fact, to produce him selected Jewesses must mate with Prussian noble men. Resolution of this constant race-fallacy is impos sible. For favored races to exist they must be distinct. And yet if hybridism is a danger, those distinctions are admitted to be perishable. "When is a race not a race?" is the puzzle-lock that no philosopher or fanatic of race has yet picked. If the known readers of Gobineau mentioned on a preceding page were the visible agents of dissemination for the Count's ideas of race, it is also true that they were helped by others, anonymous and unconscious propagandists about whom we can talk only as the "forces" or the "movements" of the century. By 1855, the date of the Essay, the first tide of Romanticism had ebbed and its strength was seeking new modes of expres sion, so that Gobineau's share of Romanticism could not carry him to renown. Imperialism, contrariwise, was renascent after a brief eclipse. The short span of Euro pean liberalism, English free-trade, and general humani tarian concepts was followed by a Realpolitik which found the inequality of races very well suited to its needs. The opening up of China and Japan and the first nibbles at the tempting African continent followed soon after Gobineau's first warning of the Asiatic Peril and the predestined slavery of the non-Aryan whites. "All that is not German is born to serve," says one of his characters in halting meter, and the idea seemed more and more borne out by the facts, provided one did not inquire too closely into the Count's definition of Aryan- white, and that one overlooked his gloomy prediction of the outcome. In France, Gobineau's denunciation of democracy 5 coincided with a defeat of the forces of liberalism and reform at the hands of Louis Napoleon, and although the 5 He wished to "do better than de Maistre and de Bonald against liberalism." (Letter to Prokesch-Osten, June 20, 1856.) new Emperor visualized himself as a reincarnation of Julius Caesar and fostered Gallo-Roman race-theories rather than Germanic, Gobineau's ideas found favor about the Court. Moreover, Evolutionism, the new mili tant religion of scientists and free-thinkers, dovetailed beautifully with the notion of superior and inferior races. The word race was on everybody's lips, for was not the struggle for survival manifested in the conflict of na tions? And within each nation was not the perpetual competitive fight under economic liberalism another aspect of that same process of natural selection? It mat tered little that both could not be true; that if nations were races and fought for survival as such, then the internecine fight of individuals could not also represent racial elements grappling for power. Distinguished minds apparently could rise above the needs of logic and com prehend in one vast vision economic competition, class- struggle, international anarchy, and Darwin's natural selection of favored races in the struggle for life. Gobineau may have been aghast at the crudity of the concepts, he for whom nuance and exactitude were an artistic necessity; but he was swept along in the torrent, and when towards the end of the century, writers began to sort out the contributions of individual minds, he was more and more often cited with Darwin, Marx, Broca, and Nietzsche as one of the seers and one of the makers of his epoch. Quite apart from these considerations, the belief that Gobineau's works fell still-born from the press is an erroneous one. He was reviewed by the leading anthro pologist de Quatrefages in the Revue des Deux Mondes, was alluded to in the same periodical by Paul de Rémusat and in scientific circles by Broca. Gobineau engaged in controversy with orientalists over his translations of cuneiform inscriptions, was popular in numerous literary salons including that of the Princesse Mathilde, and made disciples more readily than many a prophet who has never been considered ill-used. Twelve years after the Essay, Viollet-le-Duc's dictionary of French archi tecture appeared, containing a ioo-page essay which is pure Gobineau. Jacques de Boisjolin openly became a defender of the Count's anthropological views as early as 1879. Broca had refuted Gobineau on certain details, as had also de Quatrefages, but both had treated his ideas with respect. When Gobineau came back from Brazil he was "adopted" by the young Albert Sorel, a fellow diplomat and later a famous historian, who remained a warm personal admirer, though he never rightly under stood what the Count meant, or rather, never knew when the Count seriously meant what he said. Across the Channel, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who was as disgruntled about home affairs as Gobineau was about France, carried the notion that English decadence was due to race-degeneration resulting from the admixture of Irish (Celtic) and German (Slavic) blood. This illuminating discovery may have spurred on the English nationalist writers already awakened by Carlyle, Free man, and Kingsley to the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and the beauties of Beowulf. Simultaneously in the United States some Southern gentlemen printed a garbled version of the Essay as a pamphlet in behalf of slavery. It may not have flattered the author, but it was at least a token that his was not a voice crying in the desert. Al though the Count never saw any of his books become a best-seller, he found publishers for most of them without much difficulty, and was awarded the Bordin Prize by the French Academy for his Renaissance. Of course, living on into the decade past 1870 must have been a trial for a man who saw his compatriots receding farther and farther away from the political path he advocated. He himself was shelved as a diplomat in 1877 and thereby forced to sell his chateau at Trie. 6 His articles on French ethnography were becoming difficult to place because his racial conclusions sounded more and more unpatriotic. His assertion that patriotism was a piece of Latin provincialism, amounted to a crime against the sanctity of a pre-shrunk nationalism. In spite of these opinions, he served his country well during the Franco- Prussian War. Not only did he organize local hospitals and refugee shelters in the face of invasion, but he ob tained through his knowledge of German and of German high officials a reduction of nine million francs on the war indemnity assessed upon his Department. Modern critics like Maurice Lange who accuse him of having 6 Gobineau, who had warned his wife not to select a house such as Rousseau wanted for his old age, came to inhabit the very rooms where Rousseau wrote his later works. been anti-French because he retained his German friend ships—principally Wagner's—simply disregard his gen uine though peaceful war services. He lived on until 1882 but the last five years were neither gay nor glorious. He wrote some of his maturest political tracts during that period, without hope of a hearing. Yet hardly a decade after his death the follow ing he had created in Germany resounded in France through the Gobineau-Vereinigung and encouraged the growing band of faithfuls in his native country. Paul Bourget's work in the nineties, impregnated with the ideas of Stendhal and Taine, are no less full of Gobinism. The man who wrote the Sensations d'Italie in 1891, Cos- mopolis in 1893, and the Idylle Tragique in 1894, join ing the Gobineau Union that same year, cannot be called a new convert or a lukewarm follower. About this time also Gobineau found a sympathetic biographer in Armand Hayem and an influential critic in André Hallays of the Journal des Débats. Chéramy, the lawyer for Eiffel in the trial of de Lesseps after the Panama Scandal, was known to be a fervent Gobinist, and Romain Rolland not much later was recording the Gobineau-peril by means of a character in Jean-Chris tophe. Royalist, or at least anti-revolutionary opinion was being told by Paul de Leusse that Gobineau held the key to universal history, hence to French history, past, present, and future: race-degenerescence meant democracy which meant national decadence. These Gobinian ideas were percolating through milieux where young men discussed la question sociale and were about to answer it either by means of the Action Française or the action socialiste. Meantime with the rise of the sociological school of Tarde, Le Bon, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Vacher de Lapouge, Ammon, Gumplowicz, Muifang, and Closson, all of whom were writing or being published in French before 1900, Gobineau was entering the great company of the "social scientists." He was being pulled and mauled to fit many divergent doctrines, but he was being held in increasing reverence and, above all, he was not forgotten. It is apparent that Gobineau's initial effect in France, though it did not at first show up conspicuously, was fully as great as his success in Germany. The sum total of his disciples before 1900 may be divided into two or three groups which have not changed much in personnel or point of view to this day. First, those who adopted the race-theories contained in the Essay almost as they stood, that is, who affirmed the superiority of the Nordic- Aryan over all other races. Second, those who recast the doctrine by adopting the basic idea of race-character and race-superiority, but put some other race than the Germanic at the top of the hierarchy. In a third group must be lumped the numerous eclectics who mixed all the elements of Gobinism and other racial and national doctrines into a hodgepodge from which no conclusion . emerges save that the author is satisfying his vindictive- ness behind a smoke-screen of incoherent erudition. In the first group belong Renan, Taine, Viollet-le- Duc, Rémy de Gourmont, Boisjolin, Baron Carra de Vaux, Leusse, and others dealt with in their place. In the second group, the nationalists from Bourget and Faguet to Maurras, Barrés, and Suarès. Their French patriotism obviously does not permit them to take the Count openly as their standard-bearer. They often call him hard names for his Germanism and his clear-eyed criticism of French policy and manners. They simply change the names of the races in the Count's historical drama, talk of the imminent danger of racial mixture (métissage), the in alienable traits of the great race (Latin or Lorrainer or French), its function as the civilizer of mankind, and its duty of self-preservation from the poison of cosmopoli tanism. Semitization is their chief bugbear, as it was to the Count, but Protestantism and free-thinking come in for their share of abuse as the products of undesirable "races." The third group, the makers of potpourris, from their very nature defy description. C. Spiess is the extremest example of this type and a single characteristic passage taken at random from one of his works will give an idea of the stretch that Gobinism can stand at the hands of a man with a will to discipleship: "To the anthropology of race, I have wished to add biopsychology, which is the science of the sexes, of life, and of genius: the Aryan, Uranian, Dyonisian and Super-Christian mythology." III You consider yourself a man of the Fast. I am firmly convinced that you are the man of the Future— princess carolyn von sayn-witt- GENSTEIN tO GOBINEAU SHORTLY after the declaration of war in 1914, the philosopher Bergson boasted to the academy of Moral and Political Sciences that the French did not read Gobineau and took no stock in his ideas, thus differing from the Germans whose pride of race was the cause of the present aggression. Yet less than ten years before, Robert Dreyfus, a respected critic, who in view of the current anti-Semitism could easily have been unsym pathetic, reviewed the life and prophecies of Gobineau and concluded that the Count's ideas "though highly original in 1853 run the risk of appearing commonplace and irritatingly banal today, so completely is our politi cal atmosphere saturated with them." Not long after, a Catholic professor in the South of France admitted as readily the influence of Gobineau on French social life and politics. Sorel, even less sympathetic than these two, was commenting on the obvious when he spoke of "our epoch of esoteric Aryanism and Yankee imperialism." Bergson's hasty dictum is therefore typical of the blind ness that comes either from wishful thinking or a guilty conscience. Nothing is more common among the racial- ists of all nations than to repudiate all beliefs in race- theories and follow up the disclaimer with judgments and assertions that are sheer racialism. Like most of us scientifically-minded moderns, they resent the imputa tion of being superstitious and knock on wood lest they fall into error. In the spring of the year following Bergson's presi dential address, a cultured critic of conservative leanings wrote a book attempting to disentangle the good from the bad in German culture and to exonerate Nietzsche, Gobineau, and others from the "war-guilt" which cer tain patriots had tried to fasten upon them. Towards the end of the War, also wishing to clear Gobineau, Spiess wrote the work already cited, but in point of fact, the anti-Gobineau party during the War was small and in effectual when compared with the anti-Kant, -Fichte, and -Hegel or the anti-Wagner movement; after the War it became virtually non-existent, which does not mean of course that all Frenchmen believe in Gobineau, but merely that there is no organized opposition to counter act the work of the organized faithful. In twentieth-century France, Gobineau has attained the rank of a recognized classic. "He has been read with delight these twenty years past," wrote a critic in 1926. His pinnacle was not conquered without difficulty, for there was not only the taint of Germanism to overcome, but also that of Romanticism. Besides, the vested interest of those who did not want their source of inspiration revealed, or their own heroes—Taine, Renan, and Comte —overshadowed, was an obstacle to Gobineau's fame. Its solid position may be seen, however, in the unceasing publication of Gobineau material since the War. A full- length biography by Faure-Biguet was awarded one of the Academy prizes in 1931, but it was as early as 1923 that the magazine Europe devoted a whole number to the canonization of the Count, engaging distinguished writers and specialists to contribute appreciations. Eleven years later the Nouvelle Revue Française accorded him similar recognition. (Feb., 1934.) In rapid succession since the War, Gobineau's early critical works and novels have appeared, his travel books have been reprinted, his correspondence collected and edited, until it seems su perfluous for the writer of an introduction to say that Gobineau was "among the most profound thinkers and greatest writers of the last century." His disciples and admirers are to be found in every camp. The Stendhal Club treats him with respect. The Action Française con tinues to borrow surreptitiously and to attribute to Edouard Drumont or to some other journalist the "quick ening of the racial sense among the French." The reason why this and other extreme nationalist groups do not admit Gobineau to their charmed circle of thinkers is that although they take large doses of his political doc trine and maintain that race is the prime mover of his tory, to be kept pure at all costs, they are forced to preach the immovability of Race itself. For them the prime mover must itself be motionless, a static agent; Gobineau, on the contrary, shows that everything in history is mobility and change. Gobineau sees no help to the ultimate degeneration of Europe and after 1848 he has no program to offer; whereas the nationalists, par ticularly the Action Française, have a political remedy to sell. While he gloomily predicts world-fraternity through race-mixture and international leveling through socialism and democracy, the nationalists offer a nostrum guaranteed to cure all these threatening evils. They hope and he despairs. At the same time, the racial-evolutionary point of view contained in the Essay, which made Gobineau hint that his ideas had been taken without acknowledgment by Darwin and Buckle, conflicts with the Catholic dogmas of a Maritain, making him reject race as materialism, while he espouses nationalism as spiritual. In the realm of art, no such objection stands in Gobineau's way, and his racial aesthetics is best continued by the distinguished art-historian Elie Faure, and in a less exact manner by such critics as the late Paul Souday, Adrien Mithouard, Henry Bordeaux, René Bazin, Jacques de Lacretelle, and others. It is no longer quaint or criminal to be a Gobinist, or a part-Gobinist in France, and the statement quoted from Anatole France at the head of the preceding section would now appear a mark of shameless ignorance. It is true that since the second edition in 1884, no new reprinting of the Essay has come from the press, very probably because its eru dition is both out of date and fatiguing and that the cen tral Gobinian idea, so congenial to the age-old French 104 race: a study in modern superstition tradition of racialism, can be had painlessly in the bril liant works of fiction, the engaging letters, and the lively travel books. The fiftieth anniversary of their author's death was fittingly celebrated in 1932 by an exhibition of Gobiniana at the University of Strasbourg, which had purchased the collection from the old Gobineau-Vereini gung in 1903. To sum up, Gobineau waited only twenty posthumous years for fame at home. To an historian and philosopher, particularly a dead one, these twenty years cannot have seemed very long. Whatever may now be alleged, it is certainly not because of his race-ideas that renown was slow in coming. De Maistre and Augustin Thierry were more narrow-minded racialists than he; Taine and Renan were equally fanciful and rigid in their interpretations, and hence really less assimilable. No, the Count Arthur de Gobineau had to wait twenty years for recognition in France because he was a Romanticist, a cosmopolite, and an original mind more than touched with genius. In modern England his influence cannot be traced directly but his ideas are well-rooted. Whether owing to a parallel development of evolutionism and anthro pology, or because of the infiltration of Gobinism through the channel of German publicists like Penka, from 1870 to 1914 English public opinion was saturated with the notion of a superior Anglo-Saxon race, of which Britain held the cream. The decadence of France, Italy, and Spain was contrasted with the political and economic success of the Teutonic sister-nations, England and Ger many, and this self-righteous pride was heightened by racial contempt towards the Irish problem. Whether we open the pages of John Richard Green, Say ce, or Lord Acton, or listen to the less polished utterances of Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, we hear fragments of the same hymn to Aryan Germanism. In Robertson's The Germans, Grant Allen's Anglo-Saxon Britain, or Isaac Taylor's work on the Aryans, there are modifica tions of thorough-going belief, but the ground-plan of race-determinism is unaltered. The propaganda of Mosley and his black shirts may be discounted as a trivial symptom of racialism but its politi cal importance does not adequately measure the extent of race-assumptions current in England. The corre spondence columns of the Times, the speeches and books of Sir Arthur Keith, 7 the critical and biographical writ ings of Havelock Ellis, show the temper of articulate public opinion, just as Sir John Simon's already quoted assertion that he is an Aryan reveals the mind of the newspaper-reading masses. The differences between the success of Gobineau's ideas in France, Germany, and England is that in Eng land they have been adopted or paralleled without ref erence to him; in France credit was somewhat delayed and partly withheld, and in Germany recognition, both early and full, prevailed from the first. Gobineau was held in high esteem there even before 1894 when the Gobineau-Vereinigung was founded with Ludwig Sche- 7 Analyzed and quoted from in Chapter X. mann, another Wagnerian, at its head. A biography of the Count and the publication of his posthumous literary remains occupied Schemann with slight interruption from that time through and beyond the War. Many of Gobineau's works in every field first appeared in Ger man dress and the best of them are included in numerous lists of low-priced classics in Germany today. Scarcely one German racialist fails to acknowledge the inspiration of the master and he is equally revered by scientific, political, and academic writers. The guides to the litera- ure of the Third Reich place him among the forerunners of the new dispensation, and sometimes call him the dis coverer of the spiritual import of race. He has his place in the most scholarly works on anthropology, he is the subject of special studies on "race-hygiene" and the sterilization of the "unfit." Art and music critics pay him homage for his good influence on the arts and on Wag ner in particular, while literary historians award him a high rank in the world of nineteenth-century letters. Philosophers build systems on his systems, some going even so far as to belittle Nietzsche in his favor: "Tower ing high over Nietzsche," says Dr. Karl Kynast, "stands Gobineau. If the former was a poet-philosopher, a pro ductive mongrel in whom were combined and confused the poet's and the thinker's gifts and who was great only when he destroyed, the latter was a penetrating philos opher of history and a great poet as well." ( Nordisches und Unnordisches , 1927, p. 113.) Kynast complains of the confusion between the Gobinian idea and the Nietzschean pseudo-ideal and calls for a distinction between "Nietzsche the comet and Gobineau the fixed star." To familiarize the German public even more with the figure and ideas of Gobineau, a new V er einigling was planned and started under the initiative of Dr. Julius Schwabe about the same time that a complete edition of the French writer's works in German began to appear in Leipzig (1924). On the whole, this appreciation of Gobineau is sincere and fairly honest, for he never asserted that Germany as a nation had any monopoly of Nordic blood. He rather favored the English as deposi tors of Aryan supremacy, and it is simply untrue to say as some French critics have done that Gobineau has been hailed by the Germans exclusively because he flat ters their national prejudices. Few German writers make the mistake of thinking that Gobineau meant modern Germany when he said Aryan or Germanic. Besides, other French geniuses—Stendhal, Berlioz, Delacroix, Flaubert, Daumier—found Germany the first country to acclaim them, on grounds that have nothing to do with nationalism, or race. Hence one ought rather to say that the French public, supposedly so discriminating in cul tural matters, is often a little slow, a trifle blind, and very obstinate about certain types of French genius. Whether the French like it or not, Gobineau's place is secure, and by reason of their own leanings towards his type of thinking. The words he used are those used today throughout Western civilization. He did not invent them, he did not give a very air-tight system of the things they stood for, he charged them with no relentless animus and he did not propagate their use by his own powers alone. But it was something new and pregnant to have combined in however loose a system the pre existing streams of racial prejudice and theory. Before the Essay most race-theorizing had fallen into two cate gories—the anthropological racialism of Retzius, de Quatrefages, and Blumenbach; and the cultural or his torical racialism of Thierry, Niebuhr, Klemm, Guizot, or Stubbs. The attempted grafting of one upon the other branch of learning by Edwards was too narrowly con ceived to bear fruit. Gobineau had a larger scope. He was scientific and utilized Blumenbach, Prichard, Carus, Retzius, and Morton. He observed in races not only their physical characters in the manner of the old anthro pology; but, keeping pace with the new, noted their skull-shapes and stature. He was a political historian, since his whole Essay was designed to solve the histori cal problem of the rise and fall of civilizations. He was a social historian, since he revivified the thesis of Boulain- villiers, Montesquieu, and Guizot. He was a philologist who appropriated the data of Celtic research, oriental mythology, and Sanskrit literature. Add to these his piti less reiteration of the term Aryan-Germanic, and the conviction is inescapable that he is the most compre hensive expounder of a myth now become a living real ity to nine-tenths of the modern world. Omne con- cipiendum vivit: whatever must be conceived, exists. This motto, taken from Gobineau, is the essence of race- belief. But for posterity, perhaps his most novel con tribution is his belief that art resulted only from the con tact of two diverse races. Into what existing body of racial art-theories this new and original idea fitted is the subject next in order. Chapter V. RACE AND THE FINE ARTS I One guesses in his pages the eye of a North erner accustomed to living in an opaque fog.— BOURGET on HENRY JAMES, 1 885 AT first sight the arts seem a most unfruitful field for the notion of race to take root in. Culture thrives by cross-fertilization, admiration, borrowings, and even thefts, which are incompatible with the fixed bound aries and static character of the supposed races. Plaus ible or not, the fact remains that in the twentieth cen tury, it is almost impossible to open a book on paint ing, music, or literature without at once coming upon remarks like the following: 1. "He [Degas] is neither a classicist, a romanticist, nor a realist—and yet he is all three. Possibly this can be partially explained by the mixture of races which run in his veins, the aristocratic French of the Orleans 'de Gas,' the colorful and generous Neapolitan of his paternal grandmother and the adventurous Creole of his New Orleans mother." (Agnes Mongan in Catal. Degas Exhibition , Phila. Mus. of Art, 1936.) 2. "So repeatedly have temperaments of this (i.e., the classic) character appeared in France that it is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tra ilo dition, and not to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to Gallo Roman times." (Paul Rosenfeld in Musical Portraits, 1920, p. 134.) 3. "He [Charles Morice] was a Provençal and had all the emotional excitability of mind we associate with the South, although as a matter of fact it is thence that so many deep and grave philosophers have emerged." (Havelock Ellis in From Rousseau to Proust, 1935, p. !7-) Examples could be multiplied ad infinitum from the writings of all countries on all artistic subjects and rang ing from casual remarks like Kipling's and Oscar Wilde's "the Celt—always the artist . . to complete disserta tions like Eichenauer's Musik und Rasse. To be sure, this use of race is ushered in with words like "possibly," "partially," "difficult not to," "associated with," as if the critic wished to get double credit for biological in sight and for skepticism. But the fact that race is brought in at all as an explanation of art, and without any other definition of terms, reveals the extent of the belief in common speech and requires us to analyze it further. From the mass of data, the conclusion emerges that the injection of race-ideas into the arts follows three distinct lines, illustrated by the three extracts above. The first reflects the most recent ideas of hereditary trans mission of mental qualities; the second rests upon the familiar Nordic myth described in our second chapter; the third goes back to the notion that climate determines temperaments. As the last is the most ancient, we shall review it first. The climate theory was not new in the nineteenth century. One could go back to Aristotle and taking in Bodin, Vico, and Montesquieu on the way, find in them all elaborate theories of climate affecting history. But so long as there was any kind of cosmopolitan ideal in Europe and so long as the division of European society into classes was stronger than its partition into nations, the ascribing of national characters was bound to remain a mere pastime. Such it was in the eighteenth century to a Montesquieu or a Chesterfield. The wars of the French Revolution, by setting in motion huge masses of men of all ranks, intensified the feeling of national differences. In the arts, these differences were reflected by the Ro manticists who instinctively shared Herder's conception of "cultural nationalism," not to be confused with our aggressive brand of the same name. Herder's theory was that the several European nations embodied each the soul of a race, the genius of a people peculiarly fitted to produce a given culture, unique and precious, as a contribution to the general fund of European civiliza tion. It was inevitable that the Romanticists should give to race-theories a new impetus. For in its origin the desire to distinguish races is nothing more than the desire to be specific, to replace literary abstractions by a concrete sense of the endless variety of life and nature, to intro duce local color, even to show sympathy with what is alien to one's customs and prejudices. From such a phi losophy of art it is easy to pass to detailed climate-and- race theory. Accordingly it was not inconsistent for cosmopolitan minds like Mme de Staël and Stendhal to elaborate such notions and to give certain formulas a cur rency that has not been impaired by the length of time they have been in circulation. These may be briefly designated as the North-and-South principle of criticism. It is not to be confused with the Nordic myth, because it does not necessarily imply a superiority of race, but merely a difference of temperament caused in man by the climate in which he lives. But let Mme de Staël 1 explain herself how in the Europe of her day there were "two distinct literatures, that which comes from the South and that which descends from the North: that of which Homer is the source, and that of which Ossian is the origin." ( Literature Considered in Its Relation to 1 As the daughter of the Swiss financier and statesman Necker, the future Mme de Staël had been reared among the most cultured Parisian circle of the old régime. Her marriage at twenty with the German diplomat, Baron de Staël-Holstein, and her unacceptable political views during the later Revolution, Consulate, and Empire increased her opportunities for travel outside France: so that she was by taste and circumstances at the opposite pole from narrow nationalism. Indeed the main purpose of her two great books— Literature Considered, in Its Relation to Society , 1800 (note the psychological determinism of the title), and de l 'Allemagne, 1810— was not to foster race-theories but to introduce the new Germany of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller to the French. This remains her great achievement despite cavil from nationalist critics on both sides of the Rhine. 114 race: a study in modern superstition Society , I, p. 2 10.) Eighteenth-century enthusiasm for Ossian apparently did not distinguish Celtic from Ger manic, hence Mme de Staël's confidence in the fact that the imagination of the North is melancholy, wearied of life, yet fond of natural sights and sounds. The Southern poets, on the contrary, delight in all the sentiments of life; their love of nature is of a different sort, more moderate in its objects and intensity. Still, for her, cli mate is only one factor making for difference. The other is something native, some permanent character of the race of people. "One must seek in a people as in a man his characteristic trait; all others are the effects of a thousand diverse chances; that one trait alone con stitutes his being" (p. 214). This clear statement is the basis of the climate theory of art. It treats a group as if it were a single individual; it shows a passion for finding one trait, one formula to cover diversity; and it assumes that this trait alone con stitutes the being of the race or the man. In the arts, this amounts to the negation of criticism and of aesthetic experience. It leads directly to the disregard for what does not jibe with preconceived theory. It leads to word- juggling—Northern, Mediterranean, Classic, Latin, the Greek mind, French clarity, Celtic melancholy—terms which are cloaks to conceal complexity, arguments to the crowd for praising or damning without the trouble of going into details. It would be unfair to Mme de Staël to accuse her of more than a rudimentary form of the mania. What in terests her is thought and literature, not classification. The inversion of these values comes later, but builds on her foundations. We may well wonder why she laid them on just such grounds. Until one reads Mme de Staël's persuasive prose one can hardly imagine the cul tural chasm she was trying to span. The formalism and emptiness of French literature, especially of French poetry, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century of fered no standard of comparison by which the new German literature might be understood. It required a great emotional and intellectual effort to learn a new artistic idiom and Mme de Staël had to account for its strangeness, the wildness of its effects, the passion and profundity of German Romanticism. How could it be accounted for? First, by geography; a perpetually dark sky, a long cold winter, impenetrable forests, distant habitations. ( De l'ail., p. 13.) Second, by the nature of the Germanic race: loyal, good, and simple, but dreamy, melancholy, full of sentiment, music, abstract thought 2 —and beer, added unsympathetic observers. The Ger man tradition included in equal measure the furious valor of the Norse sagas, the Christian medieval epic, and the pagan mysteries. In contrast to these the "Latins" were felt to be more practical and worldly, little given to ab stract ideas and the only masters of the art of domina tion. 2 The racial character common to the Germanic tribes, despite the geographical differences between 2 Note the reversal of all these "characteristics" in the hundred years from 1810 to 1910. North and South Germany, explained the ballads of Bürger, the Faust of Goethe, the philosophy of Kant, and the painting and architecture of the German Renais sance. This picture has remained lodged in the minds of many French critics, with only one serious alteration concerning the frank, honest, and dreamy character of the German "race." Brutal, cunning, and stupid have been substituted in the heat of two wars and two suc ceeding periods of resentment. The rest of the portrait stays fixed in the face of the most obvious facts. It is idle, for instance, to tell the late Ernest Babelon, Mem ber of the Institute, that Germany is not covered with forests, that in winter there is as little sunshine in Paris as in Berlin, that Germany has scenery as smiling as that of France, in a word, that it is absurd to call Germany the North and France the South as if the boundary be tween them were horizontal and not vertical. M. Babe lon plainly will not believe it. 3 It would therefore be a great injustice to suggest a similarity between the broad understanding of Mme de Staël and his own. At the risk of some excess detail it seems advisable to complement this account of the North-and-South critical dogma with a mention of Stendhal. For one thing, Stendhal has been repeatedly called in France the father of "Mediterraneanism," which is a clumsy name 3 See his two-volume work of erudition and hatred: Le Rhin dans Vhistoire, Paris, 1916. It bears the device: Germani, genus mendacio natum (The Germans are a race of liars). for appreciation of the South. Stendhal did for Italy what Mme de Staël had done for Germany. He forced the attention of the French on a modern people who had hitherto been neglected or else seen only as re minders of the ideally draped figures of Roman history. Stendhal's innumerable sallies on race, climate, and art are suggestive without being literal, form no system, and are scattered in works of the most diverse charac ter: novels like the Charterhouse of Parma, travel-notes like Rome, Naples, and Florence, critical works like the History of Painting in Italy, biography like the Life of Rossini, and disguised autobiography like the Life of Henri Brulard. Stendhal, being a genius, found the narrow compass and affectations of French society intolerable and early became a great traveler, a déraciné or uprooted man as the home-loving critics like to call him. In the wake of Napoleon's armies, he criss-crossed the Continent, from Paris to Milan to burning Moscow in 1812, added Eng land and Spain on his own account, and finally fixed on Italy as the land of his heart's desire. He discovered in the "native passion" of the Italians the freedom and energy he demanded from life. He soon began to call himself a Milanese and thought of giving up his French citizenship. While Mme de Staël was publishing her first work on German literature, Stendhal was delving into the possible Italian origin of his family. His motive is of course that "Italy is the fatherland of the arts." On January 12, 1833, he informs a young lady that he is "altogether Italian," meaning that because the arts are his spiritual homeland he must be a native of the physical land, a typical mode of race-thinking in the arts. When you cannot infer a man's temperament from his supposed race, you simply infer his race from his temperament. So Napoleon felt on one occasion that all great men of letters were French and so Ludwig Woltmann and his followers find Germans wherever genius of a kind they admire makes its appearance. But like most Romanticists, Stendhal is too much a realist to make a water-tight system of his views on the subtle relations existing between climate, temperament, and works of art. The truism that Taine was to make famous a quarter of a century later as the theory of the influence of milieu is explicit though less rigid in Stend hal: "This kind of effervescence called the Fine Arts is the necessary product of a given fermentation. To ac count for the foam one must show the nature of the fer ment." ( Lije of Rossini , Prunières ed., I, p. iii.) In the same book a chapter on the "Nordic in Relation to Music" gives the usual interpretation of cold climate, rude vocal organs, and imaginative qualities. What he calls temperament is really what we mean by race or type, as we can judge from the following unfortunate extract: the German is "well-fed, very blond, very rosy, drinks beer and eats Butterbrodt all day" whereas the Italian is "slender, almost thin, very dark, with blazing eyes, sallow of complexion, lives on coffee and a very few abstemious meals." Stendhal has only forgotten the thin Germans and stout Italians of his acquaintance, which is bad enough, but how much worse that in writing the passage his pen did not balk at the thought of his beloved Mozart, whose music he would certainly not associate with beer and Butterbrod. The recklessness of the would-be physiolo gist is only too evident. If he assumes that embonpoint and art cannot dwell in the same human frame, he is disregarding a sufficiently obvious fact and forfeiting our respect for his imaginary science. The Ideologist phi losophy confronts us again with its faith in the correla tion of body and mind. Stendhal, as a good disciple of De Stutt de Tracy, wanted to establish in the realm of art a "biological psychology." (Hist. Fainting in Italy, p. 169.) But what faith are we to place in the critic, let alone the psychologist or geographer, who can say that "the thing that keeps the English from developing any arts is lack of sunshine"? After this even his rea sonable remarks make us suspicious. He says plausibly enough that in art "climate and temperament condition the strength of the drive: education and manners shape the direction in which the drive is applied." But it is an empty formula, for the temperament defined above and the climate instanced below are pure fictions. The English landscape school contemporary with Stendhal is enough to shatter the nonsense about lack of sunshine. This does not mean that a man is not free to prefer the products of one culture to those of another. Europe, however, has been the battleground of thought and opin ion for so many centuries that it is a question whether it can boast "pure cultures" any more than "pure races." When Stendhal says, "I feel a natural inclination for the Spanish nation," or when he criticizes the French for their Gallic delight in fashion, he is not telling us what he is really thinking of. Just what was it that attracted him in Spain—places, people, palaces, paintings? And the French fashion of his day to worship Rossini—doesn't Stendhal approve of that "Gallic" trait? So obvious are these objections that he himself in veighs against those who mix patriotism with art and "dislike a quartet because it is German." Divested of its unfortunate racial terminology Stendhal's preference, like de Staël's, is a positive and genuinely artistic one. Viewed as a personal outlook on favorite masterpieces, as the working philosophy of a creative artist designed to combat reactionary creeds, Stendhal's Mediterranean- ism can be tolerated and even regarded with affec tion: but in the hands of later comers the scattered hints become rules: the fine aperçu becomes an axiom; and the preference becomes a condemnation of everything out side its compass. Literal-mindedness could not go far ther perhaps than the interpretation placed by certain German writers on what de Staël and Stendhal had both recognized as the "lure of the South." Mme de Staël was thinking of Winckelmann and Goethe: Stendhal was thinking of himself: all drawn south by artistic pas sion, a love for the famous sunshine and the hard out lines of reality. But in our scientific twentieth century a writer thinking of these metaphors does not hesitate to associate Ludwig Woltmann's drowning in the Medi terranean with the "siren call of the South." 4 II If Buffon has done a magnificent thing in try ing to represent in one work the whole of zoology, was there not a similar task to per form for society? Does not society make of man, according to the milieux where his ac tivity takes place, as many different men as there are varieties in zoology?— balzac, pref. to Comédie Humaine WHEN the favorably known Swiss critic and traveler Charles Victor de Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bonnet, published his VHovmie du Midi et l 'Homme du Nord in 1824, 5 the public was already familiar with the North-and-South theories of art. The clichés were established and a grave critic like Sainte-Beuve could rely on their general ac ceptance. In the following thirty years no very great change occurred in racial criticism of art. It was in the decade from 1854 to 1864 that a new type of doctrine made its appearance and from various points at once. First Gobineau published his Essay (1853- 4 Lapouge, Race et Milieu Social, 1909, p. 331. 5 The book is still deemed useful by Havelock Ellis, Studies Psych. Sex., passim. 55) containing the theory of art by conflict of races that we have examined in the previous chapter. Also in 1853, a now obscure critic, Eugene Loudun, published a series of articles in Le Pays under the title of The Three Races, classifying contemporary French writers according to their race. We are left in no doubt that Loudun is speaking "not of peoples but of three races of men." Climate and citizenship have no importance for him, only the racial characters matter: the Germans have imagination: the English have positive [practical] minds: and the French are a happy mélange of the other two. The three motivating ideas of the three races are respectively absolute reason, self-interest, and common sense. Now the amazing thing is that chance can cause any or all of these race-types to be born in the same country. For instance, in France, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Balzac, and Louis-Philippe are English. Lamar tine, Edgar Quinet, and Lagrange (the mathematician) are Germans. Thiers, Falloux, Berryer, Ledru-Rollin, Cavaignac, and Larochejaquelein are French. Going back into the past, Fénelon, Rousseau, Sénancour are Ger mans. Chateaubriand, because he was a dreamy Celtic Breton, likewise is a German. Socialists and other fanci ful writers are always German. As for English men of letters, Scott like Shakespeare is held to be imaginative only in part. There are no English painters or musicians because of the practical instinct which made the Industrial Revolution possible. Goethe typifies the German race and he is the "father of all melancholy lovers of nature." German thought is in fact but a vague idealistic philosophy, and the Ger man universities can boast no specialty or science. Po litically, Germany must be republican on account of the race's lack of order. More than that, the Germans must be socialists and communists, but they are harm less, for they are honest and respectful of tradition. Be sides they do not even know how to fight. They lazily wait for trouble and their land is always the theatre of war. 6 Published in a strongly imperialist paper, two years after the coup d'état of 1851, these articles are a kind of manifesto in support of Napoleon III and the new nationalism. They end with an explicit warning against "the foreigner" and a rallying cry to the tune of "France of the French." To the historian of culture, Loudun is a sign of the way the wind was blowing. Cultural racialism was be coming political-minded and aggressive. Not climate but innate racial traits were now the factors looked for in art. Gobineau's theory of art was, as we have seen, far more competent on the aesthetic side, but it dug its chan nel in the same direction of insistence on racial traits. Near the end of the decade 1854-64 all these ideas were to receive a new unity and a new strength from the con cise and famous formulation of Taine. Taine starts with 6 This piece of profound racial psychology was composed sixteen years before the Franco-Prussian war and sixty before the war of nations. the notion of complete determinism in human affairs. "Whether facts be physical or moral matters little; they always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, as for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like sugar and vitriol." (Hist, of Eng. Lit., Pref.) Like the Idéologues, like Stendhal, Taine wants to establish a "zoology of the human mind with psychology as a physiological and anatomical principle." 7 Studies of English literature lead him to think that the race, the time, and the environment shape all intellectual activity and serve to explain it. The time and the environment can be described as historians have always done, but determining the race requires special knowledge. The critic must find the "dominant trait" (; pensée maitresse') of the work of art, the man, or the nation. The racial element is immutable and determinant within the shift ing frame of time and environment, wherefore Taine reproaches Hegel as historian for not having indicated this "physiological background—race, skull, color." (Notes of 1851 on Hegel, Objection VIII.) Taine applied his theories to English literature, to La Fontaine's fables, where he finds Gallic laughter as well as Greek and Flemish racial traits (ed. 1875, pp. 14-16), to his Italian travel notes, and finally to his large anti- revolutionary work on The Origins of Contemporary France (e.g., Ancien Rég., 15th ed., pp. 159-160; 258-9; 7 See André Chevrillon, La jeunesse de Taine, Rev. de Paris, Jul. and Aug., 1902. Régime Mod., Ch. I). The doctrine of race-time-milieu has become an accepted commonplace in French critical circles, and it is no more surprising to find it cropping out in a popular novel by Paul Adam than in a political speech by President Poincaré (at Nogent-le-Rotrou, March 14, 1897). Side by side with this popular tradition, which rapidly conquered Germany, there stems, also from Gobineau and Taine, the more recherché 1 application of the "physi ological milieu" to art which is best exemplified in the great Dictionary of French Architecture by Viollet-le- Duc, chief restorer of Gothic monuments in nineteenth- century France and principal architect under Napoleon III. The exhaustive dictionary (Paris, 1866), which still stands as a great achievement of critical scholarship, con tains in the volume on Gothic sculpture a long essay revealing the influence of Gobineau, Taine, and Thierry. Viollet-le-Duc sees race as the explanation of certain differences in Gothic sculpture and extends the prin ciple to other times and peoples. According to him, the faces represented on the portals of Vezelay and Autun reveal the presence on French soil of two races distinct in origin and appearance, differently gifted, and de voted to incompatible aesthetics. At Chartres, the famous King of Judah is "truly French or Gallic, or Celt if one prefers—nothing of the German, Roman or Frank." (Vol. VIII, p. 117.) The pseudo-Clovis at Notre-Dame de Corbeil, on the other hand, is a Northern type (pp. 118-9). "It is clear," he adds, "why type 8 [Clovis] should dominate type 7 [King of Judah] by his daring and the consciousness of his dignity; but it is also clear that the latter, in whose physiognomy there pierces a certain skepticism, will end by becoming master again" (p. 119). Despite this liberal historiography in the manner of Thierry, and this ascription of dominant racial traits in the manner of Taine, Viollet-le-Duc asserts the essen tially Gobinian idea that "any flowering of art—and this is pre-eminently true of sculpture—occurs in history only by the contact of two different races" (p. 98). The re mainder of Viollet-le-Duc's race-characterizations would be tedious to recount; it borrows freely from Gobineau without adding anything new. The entire chapter must have exerted a separate influence, however, for we find vague echoes of it here and there among writers par ticularly concerned with art—for example, in Proust {Swanrìs Way , Mod. Libr. ed., pp. 194-5, 213), an d in a scientist like Le Dantec. {Infi. Ancestr., 1905.) Elie Faure, a modern and respected historian of art, represents, not a vague echo, but a complete adoption of Gobineau and Viollet-le-Duc. His book, The Three Drops of Blood (Paris, 1929), arrests the eye first by its dedication: "To the tragic genius of the hybrids—Michel Montaigne, Jean Racine, H. de Balzac, Eugène Dela croix, rhythm-breakers and rhythm-creators." The three drops of blood are, as in Gobineau, white, yellow, and black but Faure holds out the entirely new hope that some day "haematological science" will be able to de termine "the dosage of bloods constituting, ethnically speaking, a human being selected at random" (p. 223). Not content with blood-tests, Faure represents the grand orchestration of all nineteenth-century race-theories. He regrets that the "craniometrie nature" of the ancient Greeks has not been "agreed upon" (p. 226). He in vokes the Mendelian laws and Darwinian evolution as suggestive of aesthetic principles. He classifies Dumas père , Renan, Racine, Hugo, Lamarck, Delacroix, Proust, Montaigne, and others by the race of their parents and asserts the correlation between "ethnic stigmata" and mentality. Finally, he reproduces the old historic distinc tions, with added flourishes, in such a critique of Gothic architecture as the following: ". . . the Franks did not fail to impregnate with a Germanic spirit—apparent in the musical combinations of the groining of the nave— this miraculous efflorescence of the melanized Celtic genius" (p. 39). In the light of this pellucid passage, Faure's tribute to Gobineau sounds almost like unconscious condescen sion, and any French aspersion against German racial folly like envy of superior numbers. III How would a Frenchman go about it in order not to think like everybody?— S tendhal THE question of numbers raises a point of some im portance in the history of nineteenth-century culture. Race-theories were few but were racialists many? Be fore passing on to a critique of race-critiques, this query requires an answer which, for brevity's sake, must be al lusive rather than descriptive. In Germany, from the time of Heine to that of Wag ner, criticism of art chiefly followed the loose North- and-South pattern. Heine divided all minds into He brews and Hellenes. Nietzsche wanted cultured men to be good Mediterraneans: Burckhardt followed Stend hal. Wagner himself hated Jewish art—was it Meyer beer's fault?—and was a Gobinist. In England, Anglo-Saxon literary pride took many hints from Thierry. People counted the words in Shake speare and pointed out how many more Saxon than Latin ones he had used. At the same time Matthew Ar nold was dealing with Hellenic-Semitic parallels and turning his sympathies to Celtic literature, finding the usual race-virtues as he went. Ruskin, with his social theory of art, was emphasizing the fact that great art is the product of social rather than individual effort and was putting a great deal of stock in the virtues of a "pure race." 8 The strong nonconformist conscience, with its Biblical tradition, combined with the catholic renascence to keep racial divisions out of intellectual judgments on the popular level. As H. W. Nevinson has pointed out, " 'Thy people, Israel,' were ourselves, the English race." {In the Dark Backward, 1934, p. 74.) The "scientific" approach to race-aesthetics makes it self felt more strongly after the work of Darwin, Gal- ton, and others on heredity. It culminates, perhaps, in Havelock Ellis's Study of British Genius (1904) based on statistical data concerning hair and eye color as ob served by him in the pictures of British geniuses in the National Portrait Gallery. Ellis's method only is new. His assumption is that of Bonstetten plus the faith in transmission: Sir Isaac Newton is "the supreme repre sentative of Anglo-Danish genius" (p. 42). In France, whence we have purposely and necessarily drawn the chief examples of race-criticism, the question of how prevalent it was is not in doubt for anyone who has the patience and the candor to review the evidence. A bare list, supplemented by titles in our Bibliographi cal Notes, and extracts in the Appendix, must suffice: Balzac, Mérimée, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, among the creators, attest race-judgments of art. The same holds true of many historians of literature: Edgar Quinet, J. J. Ampère, Villemain, Philippe le Bas (tutor to the future Napoleon III), Francisque Michel, Renan, Bazal- gette, Lanson, and Faguet; the music critics, Fétis, Tier- 8 See, e.g., Crown of Wild Olive, pp. 86, 97. sot, and Boschot; the dilettantes, Emile Montégut and Philarète Chasles; the philosophers, Ribot and Alfred Fouillée; the literary politicians, Challemel-Lacour, Pre- vost-Paradol, Napoleon III, Gambetta, Clémenceau—all these and scores of others evince in their casual or con sidered remarks the ever-spreading belief in the racial determinism of art. The facts being established, it remains to discuss the merits of the issue they involve. Do the supposed races condition artistic productions? Even granting, for the sake of argument, the existence of racial differences in physique, what can be inferred from them? The end less contradictions among critics using this type of judg ment do not offer a very promising answer. Rabelais is called a Frank by Paul Rosenfeld, but to Bazalgette he is an old Gallic spirit, while J. J. Ampère accounts for him and his time by "a return to pure Latinity." For Rosenfeld again, Berlioz was the Gallo-Roman, but the Germans discant on his germanische Seele, his French biographers battle over his "racial origins": Tiersot, Gauthier-Villars, and P. L. Robert find him a classic Latin type; Boschot delves into genealogy seeking a Ger manic origin for the root Beri which is the first part of his name. Where, in all this, are science and reasonableness? Would it not be more realistic, not to say scientific, for these critics to tell us openly what they mean, to refer us to Rabelais's wit, style, vocabulary, and opinions, to Berlioz's imagination, orchestral skill, and melodic genius, describing these in human and, if need be, technical terms of art, instead of talking about either's Latin soul or German race? In the second place, the notion of hereditary genius seems to partake of arbitrariness. Masson-Forestier and Gaston Gaillard happen to agree that the Germanic origin of Racine's mother explains "his ardent nature, his vigorous sexual appetite, his violent and aggressive temper, his dangerous sensuality" (Bull. Soc. Anthrop., Oct. 16, 1913, p. 589.), but the relation of these to poetry and to genius is hardly clear. Havelock Ellis seems to believe, with August Möbius, that "a poet's heredity is from his mother" ( Study Br. Genius, 84 n.), but it remains a bald assertion. In spite of Taine, genius is not a substance like tin or lead. No agreement exists in the critical world about who possesses genius and who does not. The components of genius are themselves intangible and their transmission is doubtful. If Racine's mother gave him all his determinant characteristics, why did she not write Phèdre and Andromaque? If Elie Faure thinks Montaigne and Delacroix were great be cause they were hybrids, why does he stop his racial investigation at their father and mother, instead of going back the ancestral ladder to the very first appearance of the drops of blood which infallibly contain philo sophical skepticism and the ability to paint? If he did he might find that every great artist was a mongrel of some kind, no more and no less "mixed" than the com mon man. The climate theory seems on the surface more logical than this literal physico-psychical "explanation" of art. But it is equally fallacious. As Ellis himself betrays (see p. hi of this book), the South has produced both "emotionally excitable" men and "deep and grave phi losophers." There have been puritanical Protestants in the sensual South and tyrants in the liberty-loving North, dreamers and realists in both regions. Besides, where does one take hold of geography? Central France is un doubtedly south of Northern France, but it is to the north of Provence, which is again north of North Africa. Climate is not latitude, nor is it an unchangeable factor. Montesquieu thought that one had to skin a Russian alive to make him feel anything; the modern critic is more likely to complain that Dostoievsky and Chekhov are oversensitive, perhaps because they have been skinned alive, though by other things than climate. The very flaws in the climate theory usually throw the critic back on the hypothesis of race for, by definition, the action of the climate is slow and the element of race is static. If a Southern Frenchman (unruly, sensual, and realistic) emigrates to Scotland we shall not expect him to become instantaneously a Nordic (home-loving, dreamy, and poetic). By holding in reserve either race or climate to answer any troublesome objection in the form of particular facts, the racialist defends his position by keeping his opponent in stalemate. It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the fine arts as in politics, race-criteria have ulterior motives. The simplest and most common is the covering up of ignorance. No one knows what genius is or how trans mitted. If it is credited to the race of the mother, father, granduncle, or national group, no one will be the wiser. In detail, the same applies to particular qualities in a man or his work. But often another ulterior purpose animates race-thinking, namely, political partisanship. The play of political opinion upon literary criticism has always been very strong on the Continent and when racial criteria were being bandied about in other con nections, political animus took them up as convenient weapons in the struggle of Right against Left. What other meaning can be found in the remark that Zola (a leftist) writes "brachycephalic literature"? It means simply that Zola is writing for and about the masses, who are slaves because of the racial defect of having round skulls. Lapouge, Drumont, and the anti-Semites assume at the same time that the long-skulled Aryan will invariably manifest his leadership and will therefore always be found in positions of authority in modern society. Their protest against Zola for helping to bring about the sub mission of the dolichos by the brachys somehow damages the logic but leaves the beauty of their critical theory unimpaired. Reaction against "destructive" influences from abroad operated both in France and in Germany to stir up artistic movements with definitely racial and national istic platforms. In poetry VEcole Romane, founded by the poets Moréas, Maurras, and La Tailhède sought to make French poetry essentially French by sticking 134 race: a study in modern superstition close to the classic models of the seventeenth century and by considering Greece and Rome as the only legiti mate sources of inspiration. This was but one of the numerous attacks on Romanticism, which was felt to be a foreign product, imported earlier from England and Germany and contrary to the true French spirit. 9 As the rivalry with Germany became keener following the war of 1870 and the rapprochement with England more secure after 1904, a distinction tended to be made be tween the English genius "strongly leavened with Celt icism"—therefore related to the French—and the thor oughly barbarous, incomprehensible, and dangerous German nature. It should be noted that in Germany the exact reverse was taking place and French decadence, regarded as a racial fact due to a superannuated tradi tion, was the bugaboo held up by the Germanists as a national peril. It took its place beside the ever-present fear of Semitism, and indeed was often confused with it on the word of Gobineau, who believed that all the Latin races had been "semitized, that is to say, negri- fied." The artistic principles of the Third Reich therefore are nothing new: they are old and tried ways of think ing, open only to one objection—that such thinking has really nothing to do with art and not enough consistency to be called a principle. 9 This is a commonplace of French criticism (see Ernest Seillière or Pierre Lasserre, passim ) and it has been repeated abroad (see Margaret Kennedy, A Century of Revolution, London, 1922, pp. 5 2 "54>- Chapter VI. ARYAN, SEMITE AND CELT I And he did not succeed in achieving that glory which belongs solely to the Aryan peo ples, born and to be born, and to the Sacred Zarathustra. —zend-avesta THE word Aryan comes from the Sanskrit legends in which the conquerors of the dark-skinned natives of the peninsula of India are called by that name and described as tall, fair-haired, fair-skinned, and in every way superior. The word may mean noble, or it may mean pure. It is probably related to Iran, the modern name of Persia; but it is very unlikely that there is any con nection between it and Eirann (Ireland) or any of the other words which Celticists and other linguists, eager to attach themselves to the noble breed, discovered in the nineteenth century. The whole controversy about the Aryans, their or igin, their physical appearance, and their achievements dates from the birth of the new science of philology in the early nineteenth century. For about seventy-five years before, there had been as a result of the interest awakened in Celtic literature, a great deal of juggling with etymologies, word-relationships, and tongue-rela tionships. It was during the first three decades of the 135 next century that Jones, Grimm, and Bopp laid the foun dations of philology by patient researches and brilliant hypotheses, the net result of which was to establish the fact that all the European languages except Finnish, Turkish, Magyar, and Basque were related to a much older tongue, now no longer spoken, and which was either Sanskrit or closely related to it. At once the inference was made that all the peoples who spoke languages derived from that Aryan mother tongue were related "by blood" to the group that orig inally spoke it. Thence it was an easy leap of rhetoric to speak of the Aryan people and their Aryan descendants scattered all over Western Europe. Since there was the inconvenient group of other lan guages enumerated above which could not be fitted into any crotch of the great family tree, the question arose, Whence did the Aryan people come? At first it was be lieved that they had come from Central Asia and spread in two directions, west and south, and had in both places conquered some aborigines upon whom they had imposed their superior civilization. The importance of this conquest must not be overlooked. It is at the basis of many arguments in favor of Aryan superiority, and it parallels exactly the old French idea of Boulainvilliers concerning the Frankish conquest over the Gallo- Romans. It was taken for granted that the conquerors of any aborigines must be by the mere fact of victory superior. Reasoning by analogy, nineteenth-century Aryanists looked forward to the time when the "great race" would overrun the earth, and as the so-called whites seemed to be doing just that in the form of col onization and imperialism, the notion grew that in the virtues of the Aryans lay the manifest destiny to ex pand and dominate. It is a curious spectacle to see all the intellectuals of the period regarding might as the test of deserved overlordship and never thinking that it is a double-edged argument that may turn against their own national vanity at any time according to the luck of war. A wave of enthusiasm for the Eastern religions and philosophies accompanied the achievements of the philologists. No longer termed "fantastic" and "obscure" as they had been by the rationalists of the eighteenth century, the poetry and wisdom of the East was studied and revered by the leading spirits of the age. Voltaire had used it as an argument in behalf of religious tolera tion by showing the underlying identity of customs be neath the difference of ritual as in Zadig (Ch. XII), but half a century later, during Goethe's last years and during the formative period of Schopenhauer's thought, we see in them as well as in the work of Abel de Rémusat and the young de Gobineau, a changed outlook on East ern thought. Pantheism, the notion of metempsychosis and of the evolution of the individual soul, all fitted equally well with the temper of an age that rediscovered Spinoza and pushed forward a doctrine of biological evo lution, for we must remember that Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 was the outcome of a long period of gestation and not a new start from barren ground. By an interesting coincidence, in that same year 1859 appeared what is perhaps the most representative monu ment of nineteenth-century Aryan race-belief, a two- volume work entitled: Indo-European Origins, or The Primitive Aryas, an Essay in Linguistic Paleontology by the Swiss scholar Adolphe Pictet. Pictet was originally a mystical Celtomaniac who went over to the new faith. The thesis of the work is set forth in the introduction, where we learn that Sanskrit roots are going to lead us back direct to the history of peoples, among whom there is a "race destined by Providence some day to dominate the entire globe." That race is "privileged by the beauty of its blood and the gifts of its intelligence," and these are proved by the "richness, vigor, harmony, and perfec tion of form of its language." (2nd ed., 1877, p. 8.) To account for the different physical appearance of the modern peoples who are all descended from this sup posed original race, Pictet has recourse to the old climate theory of Bodin and Montesquieu, which he conceals under the elastic term environment. Comparative lin guistics, he avers, "has established ethnography on fixed principles by methods that are safe from all criticism" (p. 10). A moment's reflection shows how plausibly indis putable the "Aryan" position was, at least before the dis covery of fossil man and the craze for skull-measuring ran athwart the closet inductions of the philologists. If the mid-nineteenth-century scholars believed that the Eu ropean peoples had originally a common tongue—and they based this conviction on their ability to relate all existing European languages to a mother-tongue very like the old forms of Zend and Sanskrit—then necessarily all Europeans must be of the same stock, for under that scheme where could any alien "others" have come from? This piece of "reasoning" was in reality a truism, as is also its corollary that "there must have been originally a pre historic Aryan people, pure and unmixed" (p. 14). Where, then, is the fallacy? Simply in the usual assump tion that language or any other mental characteristic is an inseparable attribute of physical (i.e., race) inherit ance. The point is obvious when we see a Senegalese speaking French or a Jamaica Negro talking Oxonian English. But Europeans being all more or less "white" and roughly of the same appearance, philologists like Pictet did not see that they might have come from the four quarters of the globe and still be talking a language not "originally" theirs. Pictet adds to his ethnological beliefs some theological remarks whereby it appears that even though the "Aryans" were polytheists, it was owing to their efforts that Semitic monotheism become "forever" the world religion. He is bound to have the Aryans on the right side of every question; the facts of history must simply look after themselves. Humanity and "our race" are equally affected by these considerations, he believes, so that it behooves him to do the Aryans full justice. Touching upon more and more contemporary issues, Pictet raises the delicate question of blue eyes and blond hair, which "his German colleagues prize so highly." These features form no special Indo-Germanic group within the Aryan family, according to our author, who puts the matter naively thus: "There were no Germans in Central Asia, as A. de Rémusat and Kloproth had be lieved." (ist ed., 1859, p. 88.) In any event, he thinks the term barbarian misapplied when used of these blond Germans: it is fit only for non-Aryans and the Aryans used it to show their "lively feeling of superiority over other races." {Ibid.) With so complete a picture of Aryan supremacy, it would be foolish for Pictet to weaken his position by discussing either the Biblical account of the separation of races or the origin of man and of language. Nor does he as yet seem to feel sufficiently the international an archy of Europe to set up distinctions within the Aryan family. That was left for Pictet's successors, who were unwilling to share a heritage, even one so abundant as the Aryan's, among two dozen European nations; they had to pull the Aryan blanket over their own shrinking band, until the still distant time when possibly a great scholar will be willing to make the definitive treatise on the Aryan race consist simply of his autobiography. In the English-speaking world the versatile Max Müller made himself the champion of Aryanism, effec tively using his gift for popularization and winning both attention and acclaim. The East India Company subsi dized the publishing of the Rig-Vedas under his editor ship and the Royal Institution gave him the opportunity, denied by Oxford, to address an ever-widening audience on subjects that may be summed up by the phrase Ex Oriente Lux— out of the East comes the Light. That simple metaphor, as is so often the fact in race-theorizing, has exercised a tremendous influence on the thinking of both scholars and general public until today the Aryan Swastika 1 grips in its mystical tentacles Buddha and Hitler and Kipling. Müller's retraction concerning the identity he had implied between race and language seems to have had little effect even on his own subsequent mode of expression, and the notion of Aryan origins flourished undimmed, in spite of frequent contradictions and inherent doubtfulness. The English anthropologist Taylor sets 1885 as the date when linguistic Aryanism gave up the ghost before the onslaught of the scientific anthropologists with their panoply of callipers, quaternary bones, and cubic meas ures of grape-shot. It is true that the theories of Pott, Pictet, Müller, Lassen, and other philologists were largely discredited by the last decade of the century, but their mode of thinking and many of their "facts" were carried along by the powerful stream of the new anthropological 1 The Swastika is mistakenly thought to be an emblem of par ticularly Eastern or Aryan origin. It is found in the ideography of many different tribes, and children left to themselves with paper and pencil arrive at it readily when decorating squares. (Fylfot, gammadion, Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., VII, p. 260 a.) science. 2 The scientist Broca was among other things an Aryanist. Poesche, Penka, Hehn, Lindenschmidt, Fried rich Müller, Vacher de Lapouge, Mufíang, Sénart, Tarde, Closson, as late as the eighties and nineties, com bine their information—like the journalist in Pickwick— and prove by philology plus anthropology that the Ger mans, or the Scandinavians, or the dolichocephalics, or the brachycephalics, are the only pure Aryans. Wilser of Carlsruhe thinks it unpatriotic to make the Germans descend from the Asiatic Aryans and "concludes" that it is the Aryans who are descended from the Germans. (Rev. Scientifique , Dec. 19, 1885, p. 778 seq.) Across the Rhine, the Marquis de Nadaillac, a propagandist laboring under the fear of France's depopulation, is also an Aryanist, though a strongly anti-German one who denies any connection between the "primitive Aryas, whose name means noble, faithful, excellent, devoted, pre-eminent" and any strictly German population. (Bull. Soc. Archéol. du Vendomois, 1885, p. 29; Correspondant, 1889, pp. 59-70.) Political hatred abetted the scholarship that swelled the literature of the subject. German hatred of the French, the brachycephalics, and the Semites was openly avowed (see Poesche, Die Arier , p. 44) and was returned with interest by the French Aryanists—Ujfalvy, Chavée, Mortillet, and hosts of others, who maintained that the 2 Pictet's book was reissued posthumously in 1877 with a note by the editors claiming its authoritativeness despite the recent advances of "archaeological anthropology." brachycephalic Gauls were the pure Aryan strain. The economic twist was given by the fairly widespread belief that the upper classes and nobles were Aryans and the peasants non-Aryans, the social cleavage being only the perpetuation of the original conquest. With dolicho and brachy measurements thrown in as makeweights for the historical arguments, the result is the "anthroposoci- ology" of a Vacher de Lapouge or Muffang in France and a Driesmans and Ammon in Germany. To be sure, protests were occasionally heard, even in scientific circles, against this perpetual romancing about the unknowable. R. Hartmann as early as 1876 exclaimed: "The Aryans are an invention born in a scholar's cell and not an 'original people' [Kein Urvolk\." (Die Nigritier, 1876, p. 185.) Ten years later de Mortillet recognized explicitly how misleading the word Aryan might be: "As for the Aryas, I do not know what they are. I do not know them in the least, hence I cannot talk about them." (Bull. Soc. Anthrop., 1886, p. 311.) But this declaration did not prevent him from talking subse quently of Aryan qualities and Aryan traits. Perhaps the only steadfast rejector of the Aryan fiction was Rudolph Virchow, whose mind always cut through the mist of words to a plain statement of fact: "The typical Aryan such as theory postulates him has not yet been found." (Correspondenzblatt, 1889, p. 121.) Scholarship could not lay the ghost it had raised. Too many other social forces had been set in motion behind the Aryan theory to stop it with solemn utterances or 144 race: a study in modern superstition simple common sense. The ground of discussion shifted, in the last two decades of the century, from establishing the reality of an Aryan aboriginal folk to discovering where it aboriginally came from. It seemed as if men having all been in a cradle at one time of their lives, they must discover one for their "race" as a whole. National vanities allied to the dolicho-madness resulted in numer ous field expeditions and a new quarrel among three groups of contestants: those who thought the Aryans came from Asia and conquered Europe. This position flattered those who thought themselves Aryans for in that case their great-grandfathers must have trounced their neighbors. The second group took up the converse. The Aryans had come from Europe 3 and with charac teristic expansive power had gone out to conquer India, then peopled by a dark race. The parallel with modern Aryan imperialism was neat and serviceable, for it justi fied ruthless colonization. The third group differed from the second only in determining where in Europe the chosen group arose. Many German scholars, principally Geiger, Poesche, and Penka confiscated the Aryans for their own use and stuck them aboriginally in various parts of modern Germany. Before them, however, d'Omalius d'Halloy, a Belgian scholar, Clémence Royer the French translator of Darwin, and Henri Martin the incurable Celticist, had reopened the Aryan question in a manner more favorable to French national pride. All these individual views are so complex, however, that it is 3 Bulwer-Lytton had propounded this theory as early as 1842 in X emoni. impossible to assess the merits, the concessions, the quali fications, and the contradictions of each author. Perhaps a résumé of one section of Penka's very popular work 4 will show how impossible it is to align the Aryanists in orderly ranks, or even be sure of any one author's position. Penka thinks that the dark-haired dolichos are a South- European race. It is also for him an African race, a Cro- Magnon race, and the Semites are a branch of it. The dark-haired brachys on the contrary come from Asia and fought the former group in France and Belgium. At this juncture the blond dolichos or Aryans, who had left Germany for Scandinavia, return and easily conquer the two other inferior races. They mix with them and form the populations of modern Europe. Among these, the Greeks are Semites speaking an Aryan tongue; the Slavs are Mongols that have been Semitized, and the Finns are Aryans who have abandoned their native speech. It would be possible to multiply details from our author and his colleagues until the reader would require a course in memory-aid to keep his sanity, but we should then have to go on to a dozen others all using virtually the same words, but with different shades of meaning and different opinions of the praise and blame conferred by the attributes of dark hair or long skull. We could show Penka's Semitic Greeks turning into pure Aryans with Zaborowsky. We could show the cleavage between 4 Sayce in England and Lapouge in France adopted Penka's views: Report Brit. Assn. Adv. of Sci., 1887, p. 889; and Rev. d'Anthrop., 1889, p. 181. Aryan and Semitic speech asserted by Pictet and Renan, being bridged over very convincingly by Delitzsch and Hommel, and being still discussed by Reinach in 1892. More astonishing still, we could show writers not im mediately concerned with the controversy becoming adherents of systems they do not wholly accept, and borrowing pieces for use ready made from the most opposite sources. Huxley, van den Gheyn, and de Quatrefages, for example, represent an eclecticism that adds chaos to confusion. Conceive the world of chemists divided on the nomenclature and property of the ele ments and proceeding to do and publish research based now on one system, now on another, until each worker scarcely knew himself whether Lead meant Gold or Gold meant Lead: such a phantasmagoria is no exaggera tion of the facts of the Aryan battle in the nineteenth century. II A person is to be regarded as non-Aryan who is descended from Jewish parents or grand parents. This holds true even if only one parent or grandparent is of non-Ar y an descent. This premise especially obtains if one parent or grandparent was of Jewish faith—Reichsgesetz blatt, I, p. 175, April li, 1933 SO far the political passion behind the Aryan contro versy has been shown to involve chiefly the rival Euro- pean nations and only secondarily the Jews. How Aryan came to be in our century the natural antithesis of Jew ish can be indicated here in a few words, leaving the details of Nazi practices till later. As national enmities in Europe grew sharper and sharper with the passage of time, all international groups or ideas became suspect in the eyes of ardent patriots. All threats to the safety of the state were attributed to the "alien in our midst." That alien might be a Jew, a Catholic, a freemason, or a socialist. In every instance non-national was taken to mean anti-national. It happened that the Jews had long been thought of as a distinct blood-group and were now, as a result of Aryan philology, "proved" to be a race "absolutely different from the Aryans." 5 Renan, the most widely read authority on the Semitic languages and literature, had elaborated in the years 1847-1855 the theory of the complete disparity between Aryan and Semitic tongues and had presupposed the existence of the "pure Semite." The weakness for race-portraits had pop ularized at the same time the distinction which Gobineau had independently made the basis of his all-embracing system. Renan, to be sure, had distinguished at least ten separate Semitic types, and philosophers like Fouillée insisted on that important fact when trying to combat the growing anti-Semitic prejudice in Europe. But the idea proved too complicated for publicists with an axe 5 Said Broca: "These words 'Aryan race' are perfectly scientific. . . . Pruner-Bey and Renan have shown the absolute difference of the Indo-European and Syro-Arabic languages." {Mem. Anthrop., I, 1862, pp. 234, 242.) to grind. By 1898, a traveler like the Baron Carra de Vaux while sympathetically trying to understand the Semite in Islam "with an eye to French foreign policy," reiterates the accepted dogmas. He contrasts the "vast speculations of Aryan thought" with the "oversimple intuition" of the Semitic. Socialism seems to him likely to fit the Semitic temper, and after an appeal backed by nationalist and imperialistic motives, the Baron con cludes: "Aryans as we are, we must take sides with those that resemble us . . . and zealously support in the Orient the efforts to rekindle the flame of our own genius." (Le Génie Sémite et le Génie Aryen , 1898, pp. 152-4, 230.) The association of Semitism and socialism was rein forced by all sorts of factors—the activities of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle; the presence of many Jews emancipated from religious ties among the freemasons, then as now suspected of fomenting international revolu tion; lastly, the triple appearance of Jewish international finance "scheming" across the frontiers for the downfall of the state; of increasing masses of Jewish proletarians "scheming" from below in anarchist and socialist circles; and the "scheming" of Jews in the professions recently opened to them, only—so it seemed—to encompass the overthrow of Aryan culture. The fallacy of numbers played a part in the growth of the prejudice: if one Jew were arrested among seven anarchists, the public fastened on him as the cause of social unrest, simply because the epithet "Jewish" is in itself a convenient way to remem ber the personality of at least one undesirable. The Jews themselves, like any minority, are also responsible for the fusing of diverse opinions and characters into one "race-" pattern. From Disraeli, who repeated in his novels that race is everything, to Isaac Blümchen who announced in 1914 the coming overthrow of France by the superior Jewish race, most of the defenders of the "Semite" have accepted the race-epithet and sought rather to glorify it than to deny the meaningless community of blood. Persecution, like adversity, makes strange bedfellows and in the Aryan-Semite antagonism nineteenth-century po groms and prejudices only strengthened the irrational bonds that had been forged during the Middle Ages in the name of religion. In both epochs, the link of race rested on superficial appearances immensely fortified by political passion, blind on both sides, and by the appeal to "superior reason"—first theology, later the science of language. Ill The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scot land; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish. ... It is essential to keep these distinctions in mind—1066 and All That IT has been stated earlier that the science of language which evolved the entities "Aryan" and "Semite" had been originally concerned with the Celts and their tongues. It is not the least important feature of Western race-superstition that it seems to proceed by the addition rather than by the replacement of doctrines with each generation, making it hardly possible for the racialist to be up-to-date: all that has ever been said on his subject is just as true as it ever was. Language, cranium, Nordic blondness, artistic bent are lively race-criteria equally and simultaneously. This eternal youth of ideas accounts for the fact that the Celts are always with us, even though they may have never existed. They were largely invented in the middle of the eighteenth century when the tide of antiquarian feeling among literary men began to turn away from the overworked Greeks and Romans. The Celts and their literature then typified everything that was fresh, young, and vigorous. The vogue of Mac- Pherson's Ossian and the collecting of popular ballads were signs of a genuine desire for literary ancestors more immediate than the classics. It was at the same time that researchers into language began to discover the beauty, the universality, the surpassing importance of the Celtic tongue. The name Celtae (Greek: Keltoi ) had been loosely used by Caesar and other ancient historians, to designate certain tribes fought by the Romans. From a few geographical hints, scanty physical traits, and the likely speech connection between Brittany, Wales, Corn wall, and Ireland, the whole supposititious science was built up. In France, Court de Gébelin constructed a whole historico-philosophico-linguistic system on Celtic speech, its affinities and etymologies. In England Mac- Lean identified the Celtic tongue with the original speech that the animals spoke to Adam in the Garden of Eden. At the turn of the century the Académie Celtique was founded in Paris to collect the "titles to glory of all Frenchmen—Gallic, Celtic, or Frankish." ( Mém. Acad. Celt., 1807, p. i.) La Tour d'Auverge-Corret, officially the first grenadier of France, was an active member and the memoirs of the Academy were dedicated to the Empress Josephine. Stendhal also tells us how in this period children were costumed as Gauls and what fad dish affectation surrounded everything alleged to be Celtic. ( Racine et Shakspeare, 1833 ed., pp. 85-6.) Exactly who the Celts were or whence they had come, no one knew, though everyone had his private belief. To combat the rising Celtomania, John Pinkerton published in 1814 his Inquiry into the History of Scotland. Pinker- ton, an early Nordicist, was convinced that the Scythians or Goths were the great race and that the Gauls were Germans, not Celts—"that dastard race." (II, pp. 89-90.) For him the Romans were a Scythian race also; whereas Mme de Staël adopted the more usual belief that the Romans form a separate race from the Nordic Celts or Old Gauls. It follows from this brief sampling that at the outset the whole Celtic question was a tangle of con tradictory assertions. A hundred years after its begin nings, the archaeologist S. Reinach commemorated it in these words: "Celtomania can be summed up as follows: The Celts are the most ancient people on earth; their tongue, the mother of all other tongues, has kept itself practically pure in low Breton; the Celts were profound philosophers, whose revelations have been transmitted to the bardic schools of Wales; the dolmens are the altars where their priests, the Druids, offered human sacrifices; the 'alignments' [of stones] are their astronomical ob servatories." Like every other race-notion current in the last cen tury, Celticism could be adopted on all levels of intelli gence. Matthew Arnold's and Renan's interest in Celti cism was literary and on the whole fairly intelligible; the Eistedfodds or Welsh song-fests were likewise a cultural influence of the kind that has produced the Irish Renaissance of the early 1900's with Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory as its chief glories. But Celticism had other aspects. For an England trying to cope with the Irish problem, Celticism was a doctrine that could be turned inside out and made the "explanation" of misrule. "All the while," says Justin McCarthy about 1869, "five out of six English writers and political speakers were discoursing gravely on the incurable idleness and law lessness of the Celtic race and the Irish peasant." (Hist, of Our Own Times, 1880 ed., IV, p. 277.) George Mere dith was giving fictional form in Celt and Saxon to what were thought to be the racial characteristics of the two groups, and though the novel was published only after his death, he sprinkled his works liberally with race- attributes based on this dichotomy. 6 Across the Channel Celtic blood was frequently felt 6 Particularly, Diana of the Crossways. to be the true bond between England and France. At Abergavenny on September 25, 1838, Lamartine tells the assembled Welsh and Bretons that they are brothers. They need but look at one another's faces, eyes, and hair. Their eyes are as blue as the sea, their hair of the same blond color, and their hearts of the same stout quality. The French literary historians and historical lit terateurs also became Celticists. Mérimée, the author of Carmen, had theories of his own about the Gallic Celts who came from Asia Minor to found France and bring it the Greek heritage. Balzac goes in for Celtic etymol ogy in Les Choiums; Michelet's Celticism has been noted in its place. A whole school of Celtic scholars, lasting into the present day, found lifelong tasks and public honors in the devotion to this brand of racial history. Only a few names—no doubt obscure outside learned circles—need be mentioned: Henri Martin, A. Bertrand, d'Arbois de Jubainville, Camille Jullian. But they were not alone. Numberless dissertations filled with references to Gaels, Gauls, Kymris, and Belgae, only added to the delights of the historian's delving by providing further occasions for subtlety, and it is not too rash to say that no two accounts of the Celts entirely agree, either in the original sources or in the voluminous litera ture that has grown with Celtomania. To remain both Celtic and patriotic in France, it was necessary for scholars to show that the Germans were only a branch of the Celts. The Franks who had invaded Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. were proved to be Celts who had left Gaul 500 years or more earlier under their two leaders Sigovese and Bellovese. Galatia and Galicia in Eastern Europe were names recording the exploits of early Celts or Gauls and the Celtic race was seen as the great conqueror just as the Celtic soul was the one civilizing element in mankind. Against these contentions, the Germanists, Aryanists, and Romanists pointed out that everywhere the Celts were a conquered race, that earliest records show them a disunited, unstable people; that their many fine per sonal qualities never amount to anything because they are dreamy, melancholy and impulsive. Even their litera ture is fragmentary, unformed, only occasionally mov ing or powerful. These attacks were of no avail: Celt or Gaul is still in France a term of praise, implying both strength and imagination. De Maupassant called Flaubert a vieux Gaulois, Prime Minister Briand's scheme for Eu ropean peace was praised publicly as revealing the mind of a vrai Celte, and few French readers would carp at the idea expressed by Jullian that the Rhine is an essen tially Celtic river. After that, a pronouncement like the following, taken from a serious article on French speech, ought to surprise no one, "I am a conquered foe of Caesar's, a soldier of Alesia, one of the slaves of the Circus, a rebel, ... an exile. Like Taliesin [the Celtic hero] I have lived through the past. I have seen and suffered all that our fathers have suffered. I have hated the foreigner's yoke. ... I have cursed him and his tongue for four centuries." (Aug. Callet in Poème et Drame , Nov., 1912, p. 64.) IV Pure Saxon English; or Americans to the Front, by elias molee, Chicago, 1890 Nu Tutonish, an International Language, by elias molee, Tacoma, 190Ó FURTHER comment on Celticism may appear super fluous, for of all the nineteenth-century race-beliefs it looks the most foolish in itself. It conceals, however, certain forms of thought by no means peculiar to it. The first is its coexistence in the same minds (Broca and Bertrand, for example) with other race-classifica tions. The most elementary logic would seem to require that mankind fall into a fixed number of races. But racial ists seem able to pin their faith now on a cranial division, now on a color division, now on a linguistic one, and find all attempts to make the three coincide beyond their intentions or their powers. Second, Celticism must rely on ancient texts for its broad generalizations. Now no one really knows what the words Celt, Iberian, Bryton, Ligurian, Kymri, Gaul, Gael, and so forth mean when applied to peoples. Even less certainty, if possible, exists about these names con sidered as descriptions of a physical type. It does not seem to have occurred to a single one of the Celticists read for this study that possibly the people known in antiquity as Celts included individuals of diverse physi cal appearance—some tall, some short; some fair and some dark. Still more remote is the supposed agreement of scholars on those two points. The texts form a labyrinth of nonsense to which scholarship only adds unreality. Every writer on the subject makes his own choice of what he will take and reject from his fellows, so that it is frankly impossible not only to know whether a Celt is a round-headed Gaul or a Gaul a round-headed Celt, but even to guess at the mythical consensus of opinion on the subject. Each worker declaims against the "anarchy of terms" and points out the "enormities" of his rivals. But since these enormities become the orthodoxies of the next man the only reasonable course is to preserve the same skepticism about Celtic origins as about Aryan virtues. Both rest on literary remains and eke them out with a wealth of misplaced fancy. Even where language is alive and literary documents are plentiful, race-theories cannot be safely built upon them. Seventy-five years ago, Chavée thought that lan guages represented the "immutable particularities" of the race that produced them. Surely, the most super ficial knowledge of speech relationships is enough to dis prove so patent an error. Yet writers in English, French, or German still expatiate about the racial or national traits that they display. The French find in the Germans' colloquial use of Kolossal and Fabelhaft an index to the race's underbred and barbaric mind, 7 while the suppos edly mincing speech of the French proves them to be an Affenvolk in their decadence. All such comparisons are false because incomplete, capricious, and unrealistic. The alleged incompatibility of the noises made by the Germanic and Celtic races in speaking takes no account of actual pronunciation. 8 Nor does the latest modern method of recording voices utilized by Dr. Willy Peters of Dorpat 9 in order to distinguish the races and spot the Semite seem to offer much guarantee of common sense. It is equally absent at the other end of the politico- racial scale. The Jews discriminate racially among them selves by speech differences 10 and left-wing publicists seem to entertain a similar kind of idea, justly criticized by H. L. Mencken, when they associate speech with class-consciousness (Mencken, Amer. Lang., 4th ed., p. 368) or when they refute the superficial judgments of nationalists on language by substituting equally super- 7 See Revue de Paris, Sept., 1933. Of course the French use of épouvantable and formidable does not come into the picture. 8 To take but one instance: there is a startling similarity between the French and German ü and r and even between the initial sound of the French words je viens as they are heard on the streets of Paris and that of the German word schwein. (I am indebted for this example to the keen ears of the musician and linguist Julian DeGray.) 9 See p. 268 of this book. 10 The divisions of "Eastern Jews" among Lithuanians, Galicians, Russians and Polish exemplify the process of crystallizing geographi cal, social and intellectual factors into the absolute of Race, revealed through speech. ficial class-absolutes. (Margaret Schlauch, Science and Society, No. 1.) Race-theories alter their jargon, change their ulterior motives, and mix their claims, but they cannot obliterate the initial vice of desiring to explain much by little and to connect in the life of the group or the individual some simple fact with some great significance. How the di ameters of the human skull fulfilled this requirement will be told in the chapter to follow. Chapter VII. SCIENTIFIC ANTHROPOLOGY I And when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church and the man swept out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flour, this the y e ontani y, this the Plebeian bran?— john donne THE distinction between the old "descriptive" and the new "scientific" anthropology is of course an arbitrary one, for it is obvious that an observer like Buffon was a better scientist than some undistinguished latter-day measurer of skulls. Nevertheless a rough line can be drawn between the bulk of the anthropologists who worked before 1859 and those who came after. The date is not so arbitrary as the line. The year 1859 commemo rates in the science of man two capital events: the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species and the foun dation of the Anthropological Society in Paris under the leadership of Paul Broca. 1 The significance of these two 1 W. F. Edwards had made a start twenty years before but his Ethnological Society had died with the extinction of the slavery issue in 1848. Following the lead of Broca in Paris, societies sprang up in other capitals. Rudolph Wagner founded an anthropological association at Göttingen in 1861 and henceforth coveted the skulls of his most distinguished colleagues at the University, most of 159 events lies in the virtual extinction of the hoary quarrel between monogenists and polygenists and the prolifera tion of new issues and methods that led to new conclu sions concerning the races of men. How Darwin's famous book swept out of court the old arguments about the creation of man need not be retold here. Suffice it to say that the rising generation trained in science between 1830 and 1850 no longer felt the necessity of squaring their scientific beliefs with Scripture. The period from 1859 to *9*4 * s therefore one of materialistic or mechanistic anthropology. In terming the anthropology of the second half-century scientific it is not intended to praise it, but merely to recall that its exponents chose the term to praise themselves; they chose it because the prevailing definition of science denoted precisely what they were doing—no longer merely observing and describing, but counting, measur ing, and experimenting. Buffon had experimented, to be sure, and so had Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, but they had not made it a system nor deemed it a virtue, as did their grandchildren. The anthropologists of the later period pursued the quest for certainty in the science of man by means of whom were amiable enough to die before him. James Hunt estab lished a group in London in 1863. Three years later, Soutzoff followed suit in Moscow, and from 1865 to the revolution of 1868 Velasco sought to endow Spain with a similar body, against the protests of the Catholic régime and newspaper press. The first International Congress of Anthropologists met in 1865 and became a permanent yearly institution in 1867. Number. Anthropology became the science of measur ing the parts of the human body, principally the skull, but also the features, the limbs, the genital organs, the stature, the diameter of the heart or of the buttocks. Logic required that the measurements be made on large groups of specimens in order to find the common char acteristics of the races. This process yielded statistical data. Where, one may ask, did the experiment come into this method? It was impossible really to experiment on human stock: men live too long and will not breed in order to satisfy scientific curiosity. Apart from the con tinuance of experiment with animals (e.g., Broca's work on the fertility of leporides) experiment was limited to mechanical means. In this field Paul Broca reigned su preme. Called by Darwin "a cautious and philosophical observer," Broca was also an inventive pioneer. His re sourcefulness in devising craniometers, his sphenoidal and other hooks, his consummate gadgetry for discover ing the mathematical relations of the various parts of the skull, show talent amounting to genius. One must go to the five volumes of his Mémoires d'Anthropologie for plates and descriptions of the instruments he con ceived and built for capturing the elusive chimera of race. He was followed, imitated, and finally surpassed by hundreds of researchers all over Europe, whose efforts culminated about 1900 in the 5,000 measurements that A. von Törok took on a single skull. The greatest diversity exists, of course, among the ultimate convictions of equally mechanical anthropolo gists during the period in question, but they share cer tain postulates in common, together with a common method. The first postulate, in Broca's own words, amounts to a profession of faith: "I am of those who think that the great typical differences which separate human groups are primordial." (Mém. Anthrop., I, p. 248.) A second assumption, not so universally accepted, is that since racial differences find their expression in opinions and behavior, the brain has something to do with race and the measured shape of the skull is the best way to get at the contents of the brain. This is nothing more nor less than transmogrified phrenology, and one is not surprised to find Broca paying generous tribute to the pioneer work of Gall and Spurzheim which led to the localizing of brain functions and the focusing of attention on brain studies. (I, p. 199.) The third assumption is that the measurements of skulls yield positive facts. At first sight this statement sounds like a paradox: how can it be an assumption to believe that a measurement amounts to a fact? Simply because of the nature of the human skull. There are two ways of measuring it—dry, that is, the actual skull of a dead person: and the live skull with the skin and hair upon it. This last procedure involves making an arbitrary allowance for the thickness of the tissues and hair. It is doubtful whether the tissues are of constant thickness on both sides of the skull at a given point and even were it so, whether that arbitrary allowance can be gauged accurately from the external "feel" of the scalp on the bone. We start therefore with a big variable in measur ing the living skull for comparison with the measure ments of other "racial" groups. But what are we to think when we come across the honest admission of a man like Broca that the diameter-measurements of the dry skull are no less variable in their accuracy? No two anthro pologists get exactly the same figures from measuring the same skull, and no one anthropologist gets the same figures from two measurements of the same specimen. The skull, in short, is too bumpy to be precisely meas ured. 2 The reassuring thought suggests itself that in a group of skulls those small differences even themselves out, but in fact, before they can do so, too many factors intervene. In the first place the "cephalic index" repre senting each skull is obtained by dividing the lengthwise diameter of the skull into the crosswise diameter and multiplying the result by 100. The resulting numbers are arranged on a scale starting with the lowest index and approaching 100 as upper limit. This scale proceeds by decimals (77.10-77.101-77.102) eac h °f which ex presses a very small divergence from the preceding skull. Now, the anthropologist must divide his scale into groups that he calls types. The most familiar are the dolicho (long-headed) with a small index, and the brachy (round-headed) with a larger index. Most anthropome- 2 See also, for a discussion of the different methods obtaining in France and in Germany and the "unfair" comparisons that resulted, pages 218 seq. of Vacher de Lapouge, L' Ary en: son Rôle Social, 1889-1899. trists recognized subtler groupings, however, into four, six, and even more categories, properly labeled in Greek. Whether a skull is brachy- or dolicho- or mesati- ortho- cephalic is therefore doubly a matter of arbitrary group ing. Each anthropologist devised his own nomenclature, and the place of each skull in any one class was more and more uncertain at the edges of the series. Skull X, for instance, with a none too exact index of 81.34, might be brachy with Broca and mesati with Mantegazza. In the racial conclusions, these details are lost sight of. Long before the end of the "study" skull X has become irre trievably brachycephalic, its origin in a city cemetery has endowed it for the anthropologist with "proletarian" qualities, and the anthropologist has discovered a "law" correlating low-class city populations with round skulls. This example drawn from Broca is worth more detailed exposition. He measured 125 skulls found buried opposite the Palais de Justice in Paris. From their position below the surface he assigned them to the twelfth century, and from the aristocratic nature of the district in that century he believed them to belong to the upper classes. He com pares with them 259 skulls originating from nineteenth- century paupers' graves. He measured, multiplied, di vided, grouped them, and then showed the difference "between the wealthy classes of the Middle Ages and the modern proletarians." (Mérn. Anthrop., II, pp. 3, 5.) That difference is expressed in figures accurate to 0.40 or four-one-thousandths millimeters, when one redivides the index number by 100. But what do we really know about the supposed medieval skulls? It is easily probable that among them are the brain-pans of low-class domestic servants; again, among the nineteenth-century paupers' remains were many originating in the Morgue, the bodies of suicides, which not only introduces an abnormality that mars the validity of the series, but spoils the "pro letarian" and national unity of the group, since a Paris suicide might just as well be the unidentified scion of a Hungarian noble family as an itinerant Swiss tinker. This example is cited at length to show the procedure of the scientific anthropologists and to suggest doubts regarding the value of the results. One is readily im pressed by the care, the intelligence, the devotion behind the figures of Broca. The figures themselves have a com forting air; they seem to speak for themselves. Unfortu nately, when an honest scientist, a trained anatomist and physiologist such as Broca informs you in print that city people tend to have rounder heads than their country cousins, the fact of his training and his honesty guarantee nothing. The callipers and the figures refer to little that is tangible. It is not the fault of statistics as a science, but of the thinking behind the statistics. When a farmer finds consistently that one orchard yields him more apples than another after he has expended the same care on both sets of similar fruit trees, he is justified in conclud ing that the land or the exposure of one orchard is better than the other's. His conclusion, though crude, is prob ably sound because he has compared things identical save in the one respect at issue and because he has counted apples. But what has Broca counted? He started with skulls, of which he did not precisely know the origin; then he went to diameters, which he reduced to cephalic indexes—a purely arbitrary notion but one which we willingly accept, until we discover that the final result is expressed in terms of twelfth-century aristocrats and nineteenth-century proletarians. We started with apples, as it were, and end up with complex social entities. But there is worse yet to come: Broca was too intel ligent to be taken in by the uncertainty of his method. He points out that the cephalic index is "neither a simple character, nor a natural one." (II, pp. 16 seq.) It depends on the relation of two independent diameters, and can therefore vary owing to the increase of the one as well as the decrease of the other. Brachy, dolicho, and similar expressions have therefore "a purely conventional mean ing." {Ibid.) A dolichocephalic does not occur in nature in the same sense as an apple or a horse. Still Broca, by comparing the averages of unreal entities feels himself "authorized to conclude about the different ethnic ele ments (i.e., races) when the skull-averages of random series give markedly different figures." {Ibid.) Anthro pology can therefore say nothing about the individual, but it pretends to describe and forecast the nature of the racial groups. Broca and many of his colleagues see this very clearly, and oppose the racial skull-absolutes of Retzius and Pruner-Bey. Still, it is one thing to acknowl edge the limitations of a method and quite another to remember them in stating conclusions. Broca himself constantly takes his relative results for absolute ones; in other words he starts with a blind and dumb skull, a fragment of jaw, translates it into a mathematical entity and finally resolves it into a human personality with all its social attributes and historical antecedents (prole tarian, white, lacking initiative, Aryan, non-Aryan) for his measuring science is supplemented by reliance on the usual color-division, on "Aryan" philology and on plain race-history in the manner of Thierry. Further, he admits that the influence of environment, climate, and occupation may have worked upon the cranial characters, but within very narrow limits. He is aware that the post-coronal depression is often a result of tying a bandeau around the child's head, but he seems to disregard other skull deformations reported by his colleagues and resulting from either the effects of burial or the method of delivery at birth. The question of racial "origins" as far as the skull goes, would then rest in part with the gravediggers, the midwives, and nurses of Europe and would have little reference to society, civilization, progress, and all the other issues that under lie race. What is discouraging about Broca is not at all that he is stupidly fanatical about his methods and theories; on the contrary, admissions like the following force us to respect his intellect and make of him an exact scientific parallel to Gobineau: "The more I have multiplied my cranial researches, the more I have become convinced that the comparison of races can furnish no absolutely decisive criterion [caractère ]. It is by the sum total of all characters that analogies and distinctions of race can be established." (Ill, p. 298.) The second part of the statement is an illogical attempt to salvage something jettisoned in the first. He then stultifies his admission by proceeding to talk blithely of the "Gallic blood tending to recover its pre-eminence in the Frankish aristocracy of the St. Barthel Cemetery." If one needs the sum total of char acters to compare races, how did he find "Gallic blood" in a cemetery and by what process does he make sure of his Frankish aristocracy? Babble about "the resistance of the nasal index to cross-breeding" hardly atones for such flagrant inconsistency. We are no farther away from the contrast of Franks and Gauls than we were at the end of the seventeenth century with the crotchety old Count of Boulainvilliers, who could utter the same enormities with better excuse, since he did not have the priceless advantage of micrometer callipers. But having recurrent doubts, Broca added to his criteria cranial capacity measured with small shot, mercury, or fennel seed; and nasal and orbital indexes, measured with special hooks and rulers. After working on the nasal index, which he adopts in spite of "the obliquity of the measurements" Broca pro ceeds to apply it to modern and ancient nations: "The Franks brought with them a new nasal type. We know that from the earliest times of the conquest, the Frankish aristocracy intermarried frequently with the Gallo Roman aristocracy; this progressive mélange in which the blood of the conquered race was gradually to sup plant the blood of the foreign, was no doubt in the beginning not very uniform . . . [now] . . . the Franks were not leptorrhinian [narrow-nosed] like the peoples of Western Europe, but mesorrhinian like the Mongols. They were nevertheless of the Germanic race . . . and . . . the modern Germans are as leptorrhinian as the French. The mesorrhinia of this people [Franks] belong ing to a blond and white race, therefore constitutes a unique exception." (IV, pp. 338-9.) Broca further admits that the cephalic index has changed its significance since Merovingian times, that the process of ossification is capricious enough to throw off the keenest anatomist, and that "individual variations are always greater within a given race than the distance which separates it not only from neighboring races, but sometimes from all other races." (IV, p. 356.) II There is war, not peace, in the camps of the learned— woodbridge THESE results and concessions, though they may no longer satisfy us, do not seem to have daunted the an- thropometrists. Not content with ascribing race-differ ences to modern populations and to peoples that have left no name in history, the scientific anthropology of the nineteenth century confidently reached back to pre historic times and, trusting in paleontology and archae ology, differentiated primitive races on highly specu lative evidence. One of the forces behind this interest was the relevance of prehistoric anthropology to Dar winism. Not only was the question of origins brought up in a new shape by the triumph of evolution, but the way in which the human species had changed was en grossing the best scientific minds. The year 1859 saw another important event in the public confirmation of Boucher de Perthes' discovery of human remains in the Pleistocene or early Quaternary period, necessitating a revision of the geological and archaeological chronology. The existence of antediluvian man, as he was called, led to wonder about his culture, temperament, and physi cal appearance. Here, too, Broca was in the forefront of speculation, and we find him in 1867 making affirmations on the flimsy evidence of bone fragments, nasal angles, and cranium capacity. It adds to the high comedy of these endeavors to recall that these "races" exist only in the form of arabic nu merals and decimal points. The tangible data were stone tools, human and animal bone fragments and a very few undamaged skulls. But even these were subject to doubt when the rival theorists came to grips. Broca shows how two of Retzius's so-called Basque crania were simply unidentified and unidentifiable skulls, coming from God knows where. Pruner-Bey's plaster "skulls" at the Paris Museum of Natural History, which were labeled as "mixed Iberians," turned out to be of Swiss origin and to have had all their labels switched about in the course of setting up the collection. The story of the Truchère skull found near Lyon is a saga in itself. Honest dis coverers of genuine remains were free to admit that the normal conditions of unearthing a find were fraught with the greatest danger of unconscious fraud through the inclusion of spurious bones, and liable to error in noting the depth of the remains through clumsy shovel work. Yet it was in the teeth of these handicaps that anthropologists who had been nowhere near the spot of discovery, who had not even seen or touched the remains, but who took someone else's measurements and reconstructions, built up theories of prehistoric racial characters, juggled with skull-indexes, called each other names, and filled the general public with prejudices about their origins or that of "the enemy across the frontier." The strength of the passion can be gauged from one of its effects on Broca, whom we must call a great and an honest mind in spite of all his aberrations. It leads him, who had earlier proved mathematically that a series of not less than twenty skulls is necessary to make meas urements valid, to say that ten skulls often suffice, and on another occasion to conclude about a prehistoric race on the basis of two or three skulls in not very good repair. Still elsewhere he warns students that fifteen is the minimum number for a "sufficient series." (IV, p. 764.) 3 Such variable minimums served him to answer the question generally mooted: whether dolichocephal- ism represented a "superior type," that of the Indo-Eu ropean Celt or Aryan who had conquered the "native" brachycephalics. His answer, not free from the taint of nationalism, is that the Indo-European invaders did not introduce dolichocephalism into Europe, but that the na tive races whose remains antedate the age of bronze were both dolicho- and brachycephalic. He adds, against the "Nordic contention," that the brachys doubtless had larger and better brains than the dolichos. On both sides the belief that skull shape carries with it cultural qualities is taken for granted. From Broca's involvement one can judge of the soundness of lesser men. Their "thinking" and their quarrels can be seen in dramatic form in the reports of the Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology held at Paris on August 30, 1867, where Thurnam and Barnard Davis, Van Düben, Pruner-Bey, Broca, Topinard, Morton, Nott, Gliddon, and the shades of their predecessors or colleagues, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, Retzius, Rudolph Wagner, Huxley, Haeckel, and Virchow fought Homeric battles wanting only the laughter of the gods. 4 Three years before the Franco- Prussian war, one can discern in that meeting the ill- 3 By 1879 Broca had acquired a total of 2,000 skulls composing sixty series. Retzius had collected 300 for his original work but based his ultimate results only on five. 4 Unless one counts as such the points made in the memoir en titled " How I learn pre-history while sowing carrotsMém. Anthrop., II, pp. 130 seq. concealed animosities of nationalists underlying the vigor ous enmity of rival theorists. The visible confusion of armies clashing at night could yet leave on the educated layman reading a newspaper- report a very distinct impression that progress in civiliza tion depends upon race. Broca repeatedly asserts it in so many words. He judges the aptitudes of races for prog ress, and he concludes that the whites as a whole are superior to the blacks as a whole. What this implies about colonization and imperialism is not left unsaid, any more than are the suspicions about the ulterior motives of particular nationalist theories. "Our colleagues on the other side of the Rhine" is a phrase tossed back and forth by French and German scientists. Anglo-French national animus is almost wholly absent, the belief in Celticism suggesting a prehistoric bond that was not disrupted by the Norman conquest of England. In this entire scheme of skull-measuring only one question was generally avoided despite sporadic refer ences to it. It is the capital question of how a race re mains a race. In all the scientific anthropology of the nineteenth century the sole business of the investigation seems to be to find what races were like , rather than what a race was. The distinction is not in the least a verbal quibble. This dolichocephalic skull in Broca's hand is not a race—it is a sample of a kind of human skull. This col lection of dolichocephalic skulls is not a race, either: it is only a group of similar skulls, presumed to belong to the same race. Possibly the similarity depends on the fact of having had somewhere in the past a pair of com mon ancestors, for otherwise it is accidental and mean ingless. We do not speak of all the round pebbles on the beach as forming a race. In other words, a race must start as a family, a human couple with its offspring. But if that is the case, we must turn our attention to a whole new set of facts—the facts of hereditary characteristics, their transmission, their mixture, their permanence or disappearance. Broca and his colleagues all too summarily dismissed this then and now essential problem. Their similar skulls are really, for all they know, two pebbles on the beach. They might as well class together all human beings born with the ring finger longer than the middle finger and call them a race. 5 One excellent reason why the scientific anthropologist did not take up the problem of race bio logically but only anatomically was that the science of genetics was not yet born. An exception to this general condemnation of the anatomists was André Sanson, at one time President of the Société d'Anthropologie. His position as professor at the Agronomic Institute partly accounts for his special departure; for it was his knowl edge of animal races and species in agriculture that led him to make wider applications of the biological con cept. Broca had said: "Despite the unity of the funda mental type, men present numerous profound varieties or modifications based on external, physiological, ana- 5 Casanova laid much stress on this "sign" of artistic sensitivity. tomical, intellectual, and moral characters . . . there still exist pure races . . . and statistical measurement can alone demonstrate whether a race is progressing, station ary or decadent." (I, pp. 7-17.) Sanson replied: "The whole question is to determine experimentally what a species is . . . Broca's method is incontestably illusory; the shape-of-skull system is cha otic and powerless to distinguish types." ( L'espèce et la race en bìol. , pp. i, 46.) The great problem, for Sanson, is to determine experi mentally what the species is. Species must be clear and unchanging, whether or not they have been recognized as such in the past, and whether or not they once existed as varieties. He believes that there is no constant variety (pp. 310, 317) and that any "race" is the descendants of an original couple, with or without physical similarity among the offspring, in other words, a collection of families. He concludes that "race is the physical mani festation of the actual species" (p. 317); that is to say, the existence of races in the sense of unchanging varieties is still to be proved. These ideas have only recently been followed and then only by a few modern anthropologists. The suc cessors of Retzius, Broca, Beddoe, and Taylor—be they Deniker, Ripley, Montandon, or von Luschan, did not greatly change their methods or point of view during the first decade of the twentieth century. The scientific imagination was slow to grasp the fact that race-defini tion on the one hand and the multitude of living human beings on the other, must be reciprocally and exactly ordered in biological terms before one can assert: "This man is of that race" and "this race is composed of men who are thus and so." Ill Masses of men will be massacring one another for one degree more or less in their cephalic index. — A lfred fouillée in 1893 IF we survey the whole movement of scientific anthro pology with the "eye of eternity" and try to assess its importance, we are compelled to admit that it had ex traordinary consequences. Scholastic, puerile, and ver bose though it was, its effects were practical and ex tensive. Militarism and criminology were its first bene ficiaries. As early as 1868, the efforts of members of the Société' d'Anthropologie of Paris contributed to the legal lowering of the stature-exemption for military recruits. It was held unfair to make the several "races" within France, congenitally different in stature, attain the same height, which was consequently lowered to 1 meter and 55 centimeters. Already in the sixties the rumor was cur rent that the French race was degenerating. The size of the conscripted men and the falling birth-rate were taken as signs of decadence. For the first time in 1854, the number of deaths exceeded that of births and from then on a copious literature has flooded the country without settling either the figures or their social significance, al though its authors early enlisted the aid of anthropology. The notion that height was a racial character that does not change under social or geographical influence gave rise to an absurd piece of reasoning: human stature is an unchanging character, hence the fact that our soldiers are getting shorter and shorter cannot be due to under nourishment or changing environment through indus trialization. It must be that the race is degenerating. The nightmare of the race's disappearing gradually like the Cheshire cat, leaving only an index number behind, must have haunted many a patriotic student of society. How degenerescence, or change, could attack the race—some thing by definition unchangeable—proved no stumbling block, and "reasons" were as plentifully offered for it, as for the puzzle Charles II set his Royal Academicians —why a dead fish weighs more than a live one—without reference to the truth or falsity of the case put. Under the Third Republic, when the strength of the race was doubly an object of solicitude, the science of military anthropology found its most indefatigable prac titioner in Dr. René Collignon. He thought it the noblest task of anthropology 6 and a patriotic duty as well, to draw up a map of the racial types living together as Frenchmen and to show that the "prehistoric races," far from having been annihilated by conquest had survived 6 Ammon was doing the same thing in the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1886. through the centuries. Collignon was himself a military doctor and carried out his researches as member of the review commissions for compulsory military service. He prepared a handbook for the use of similarly-minded military doctors, and he managed to put together his longed-for racial map of France "before railways and telegraph obliterated the races by mixture." ( UAnthrop. au Conseil de Révision, Paris, 1891.) His races rest on four indexes: height, cephalic index, nasal index, color of hair and eyes. He is careful to show how difficult it is to take these statistics quickly and accurately while doing the main job of passing on recruits. Indeed he proves the difficulty so well that one is inclined to believe it insuperable and consequently to doubt the value of his figures. By their means he proves that the Celts have round heads and the blond and Mediterranean races long and narrow ones. How does he know that a round-head is a Celt? Simply by finding out from Caesar or Proco- pius what regions the Celts inhabited in Gallic times and measuring the people in that locality today. Collignon's science walks on crutches—one is a yard-stick and the other a five-foot shelf of the classics. But other difficulties surround the military anthropometrist. He measures for the most part youths of twenty, though the period of reaching full growth varies among individuals up to the age of thirty, before which time both extremes of height and shortness have a tendency to be eliminated by death. Besides, the accurate measuring of any one index like height is a very delicate business. The posture, the thick ness of hair of the subject, his physical health and the amount of sleep he had before the measurement, all play a part in making uncertain the bare figure from which the "racial" average is derived. Collignon's averages pro duce such contradictions that he is obliged to make hypotheses at every turn, and for a given region like the Department of Côtes du Nord, he postulates "four or five stocks intermingled, of which probably two belong to the same race." Even after that he does not appear enlightened by his researches and if not he, then cui bono? The effect of anthropometry on criminology will not detain us long. From detailed measurements to finger printing, the work of Bertillon and others aims chiefly at the identification of individuals and not of races, so that its validity rests entirely on the fact that a human being cannot materially alter his physique at will. The Bertil- lons were also interested in distinguishing races, but their method does not differ from that of Broca or Topinard. Nevertheless, the anthropological view of crime empha sized one highly debatable point: it ascribed crime not to circumstance and environment so much as to certain conformations of the brain and body. There resulted a widespread belief that all criminals are degenerates and that the offspring of a criminal is fated to be a criminal. Without exaggeration it made of criminals a distinct race, recognizable by the long jaw, flattened nose, scanty beard, and certain abnormalities in the size of head and brain that indicate a reversion to savagery. This descrip tion, paraphrased from Lombroso, the Italian anthro pologist, was popularized by him in the nineties and it has stuck in the public mind to this day. In 1900, how ever, a typical "psycho-physiological study" by five physicians on the body of a maniacal strangler named Vacher brought out interesting differences of opinion. It was found that the third frontal convolution of Vacher's brain resembled greatly that of Gambetta's corresponding part. Dr. Laborde insisted that the dif ference between the depraved assassin and the savior of his country lay in a "simple functional deviation." The others tended to support the rule that the organ and its function are as cause and effect. Over the body of a convict was being fought out the great philosophical quarrel of the century, between strict materialism and the dualism of mind and matter. It was another aspect of the race-question, since the scientific racialist must be a strict materialist. For him, given bodily features a, b, c, d, only one type of mind is possible. But viewed critically the argument is bad even as materialist thinking. It takes no account of the modifications to which the features a, b, c, d, have been subjected during the life of the or ganism. It says: Once a criminal or Aryan always a criminal or Aryan, and refuses other evidence. Material ism and mysticism here join hands. The more diffuse results of scientific anthropology upon nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture are not less important than those on militarism and criminology. Between the practicing scientists and the newspaper writers, an imposing group of intellectuals, educated in some branch or distinguished in some profession, were engaged in "investigating" or propagating the great anthropological truths. Ammon, Gumplowicz, Bouglé, Pouchet, Drumont, Colajanni, Clavel, Léon Daudet, J. Finot, Bocayuva, A. Firmin, SoufFret, A. Hovelacque, Letourneau, Lefèvre, Muffang, Odin, Velasco, Closson, Nietzsche, Pittard, Seillière, Gehring, Cornejo, H. S. Chamberlain, Aline Gorren, Homer Lea, Havelock Ellis, G. Ferrerò, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, are but a few taken at random from an interminable list. Their names cover Europe and the Americas as well as the arts and professions, without including the recent Third Reich publicists and their German forerunners in politi cal anthropology. Among the latter only one name, Nietzsche's, is of the very first rank. This is a measure of the importance of the others. The great man is usually without power and influence until a good while after his death—it was particularly true of Nietzsche—whereas the others, holding down posts in the universities and the civil service, or else established as critics, litterateurs, politicians, physicians, and lawyers, really form the anonymous leadership of public opinion. This is not to say that the great minds of the period escaped the influ ence of scientific race-theories. On the contrary scarcely one can be found who does not show a trace of the superstition, but the great artist, thinker, or statesman ordinarily reflects those superstitions without actually propagating them. We can find some kind of race-belief in Clémenceau, Poincaré, Briand, Claude Bernard, Freud, Le Dantec, Bergson, Brandes, d'Annunzio, Ruskin, Mat thew Arnold, and Henry James, but it does not form the core of their thought or the goal of their endeavor. They accept race frequently without question, as they do the Copernican theory and the existence of bacteria. The lesser, more immediately powerful men, on the con trary, think race night and day, see it everywhere, and help out one another's hallucinations by writing books, forming schools, and engaging in a war of words that carries them momently farther away from the counsels of good sense and the reality of Man. Chapter Vili. RACE AND THE NATIONAL ISTIC WARS: 1870-1900 I There is in race a latent political genius which is sometimes incarnated in a statesman— rémy de gourmont BETWEEN 1870 and 1914, Europe was simultaneously a prey to all the forces previously described as acting separately towards the intensification of race-beliefs. Na tionalism was an acute and universal fever; the unrest arising from industrialization, rapid or slow, was giving rise to a host of revolutionary movements; philosophy and the fine arts faithfully reflected the national and social struggles; science and evolutionary theory were conferring certainty upon the most diverse fanaticisms; imperialism and prestige-diplomacy were clutching at every argument for the furtherance of commercial aims in Africa, America, and the Far East; finally, free public education, the newspaper press, and manhood suffrage were making millions participate in national policies, either as voters or readers; and the nature of the machin ery for this participation was such that the simplest ideas, the crudest superstitions, stood a better chance of spreading and surviving than the more complex and difficult. In such a state of things one might reasonably expect a luxuriance of race-beliefs, and the facts bear out the supposition. All systems and ideas of superiority based on race served to express and aggravate the problems enumerated above. Less and less discrimination was used by the proponents of race-doctrines in foisting their wares on the public. For one thing, that public was a product of newsprint education; for another, race- slogans—Aryan, dolicho, Anglo-Saxon, Celt, tall blond, or Semite—were wholly absorbed into the common speech of all classes; then, too, the tenseness of the inter national strife seemed to justify loose thinking and mass- denunciation as patriotic, while the shield of science was raised over the racialist to save him from attack by the intelligent layman. At one instant, Realpolitik is invoked to cover inaccuracies, and the next, the errors so justified find asylum in the laboratory. Although no harmony of any kind must be sought for in the din of racialist voices, it must be introduced willy- nilly in order to describe the period at all. Four general trends may be discerned for that purpose. The one in volves France and Germany and deals in Aryanism, Celticism, and Germanism. Another comprises all the at tempts to connect race with social unrest. Generally it makes of the socialists a race of revolutionaries with Semitic noses and brachycephalic heads. The third di vides Europe into two camps—the Anglo-Teutonic in the ascendant, and the Latin in decline. The Slavic group oscillates between the other two. The fourth and last race-grouping sees things in black and white. Europeans must stand shoulder to shoulder against the colored hordes of black, red, and yellow men whom they have aroused from their ancestral torpor in the name of civili zation, else European culture, or rather Civilization itself, is doomed. Rash as the generalization may seem at first sight, it is none the less true that no European figure of major importance in any walk of life escaped, during that pe riod, the contamination of one or more of these beliefs. Many took for granted the truth of all four, each in its sphere, regardless of contradiction, and the most vocal were by no means the most inconsistent since it is easier to hold incompatible views on the same sub ject when one is not engaged in treating of it. The gen erality just made cannot, in the nature of things, be proved; it can only be tested, here and there, by gradual familiarity with the politics, the historiography, the arts, and the periodical literature of the epoch. Even a sum mary of it cannot be given without reproducing in ex cessive measure the confusion and the tedious repeti- tiousness of the data themselves. In these pages no doubt enough will pierce through the further condensation of fact to convince the skeptical. That condensation itself will present five "moments" lifted out of the half- century in question—the aftermath of the Franco-Prus sian War; the Dreyfus Affair; Germany under William II; the rise of new sociologies; and the Great War. But before these ordered presentments, some illustrations taken at random will convey the confusion. While in France the "specious doctrine of race, tongue, and nationality" was leading the Second Empire to ruin (Hovelacque, Langues, Races, Nationalités, 1875, p. 7), Italy was fighting along the path of national unity to an accompaniment of similar issues, involving long skulls, Germanic populations, and inherent capacity or inca pacity for government. The same questions of unity and power occurred for Bismarck somewhat later and he de cided that "the Gaul was easier to govern than the German," flattering the latter with the possession of un ruly blood. (Reichstag, March 18, 1867; March 6, 1874.) Meantime Clémence Royer, expounding Darwinism and race in the public press, was considering nations as living organisms competing in the universal struggle for life. The racial inequality of nations thus "placed in the organic series" led to improvement, to a greater display of ingenuity, and to the survival of the fittest. {Journal des Econ., Nov., 1875.) This competition, visible enough in industry and diplomacy, was halted only temporarily by such shocks as the taking of Khartoum and the death of Gordon. A shudder of panic ran through the Eu ropean press and for a time there was talk of white- brotherhood against Islam. Relaying the news from Lon don, John Lemoinne called for a "tightening of the ranks among civilized nations in the face of barbarism." {Journal des Débats, Feb. 7, 1885.) Leading to other kinds of alignments, the fear of radi- calism drove publicists and scientists alike to race. A Stuttgart anthropologist studied the Reichstag election returns from Swabia and found them the "expression of a natural instinct, rooted deeply in the native character of the people. A decided connection obtains between dark eyes and democracy." (Kollmann, Archiv, für Anthrop., 1877, p. 173.) The practical value of race-consciousness in coloniza tion among "inferior races" to ward off the impending dangers of race-mixture was made explicit by the popu larizes of science like Topinard ( VAnthropologie, 1879, pp. 11-12) and by later publicists down to Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Race-feeling was used as an explanation of greater or less success in imperialism by the various nations of Europe in their struggle for a place in the sun. (Laupts to Zaborowski, Bull. Soc. Anthrop., 1898, pp. 392, 397.) The Latins were poor colonizers, the Anglo-Saxons highly successful. Was it irrelevant to ask where Teutons and Slavs fitted in this racial scale? Race was again resorted to in the arguments of sub ject-nationalities about autonomy and boundary lines. So, the Albanians in 1883 protested to the foreign offices against the ceding of Epirus to the Greeks. Their memo randum, supposedly inspired by Italy, said in part: "To understand why the Greeks and Albanians cannot live under the same régime, it is only necessary to examine the entirely different structure of their skulls; the Greeks are brachycephalic, whereas the Albanians are dolichocephalic and lack almost completely the occipital protuberance." (Fouillée, Psych., 1898, p. iii.) The nationalist propaganda that had to be exerted for the welding together of the new Germany rested on much the same grounds. A Pan-German League publica tion dated 1899 refers to the Celtic blood of the Swabians and Bavarians at the time of the Rheinbund justifying then an alliance with France, while the "proportion of German blood" kept those same peoples from uniting with the Slav. These proportions of blood having been changed, politics followed suit. (Schultheiss, Deutscher Vorschlag , p. 4.) This explanation of politics by race was so generally accepted that a French Dictionnaire Général de la Politique (1884) does not so much prove it as expound it, and the Saturday Review asserts that "the biological view of foreign policy is plain." (Feb. 1, 1896.) The racial antagonism between France and Ger many is therefore a quarrel of persons and not of prin ciples; a local and chronic condition frequently paralleled elsewhere. Change the proper names and any German pamphlet or article could be signed by a corresponding French writer; while for many other nationals of Europe even the racial adjectives could stand unaltered. II The men of my generation are those of whom it has been said that they were hypnotized by the Rhine frontier— albert sorel THE era of exasperation between the two wars of 1870 and 1914 began in France with psychological depression and ended in nationalistic fervor. The terms of the Treaty of Frankfort (1871), coming on top of the humiliation of the Second Empire and the unification of the new Germany was followed by the diplomatic isolation of France at the hands of Bismarck. These reverses are suf ficient to account for a widespread feeling of inferiority among the ruling and educated classes in France. But added to it was a sense of England's renewed colonial supremacy under the leadership of Disraeli and an aware ness of the growing power of the United States, which had not only reasserted its unity in 1861-5 but had served an unspoken threat forcing Napoleon Ill's withdrawal from Mexico. It was not difficult for some Frenchmen to generalize from these facts that certain nations—Ger many, England, the United States—were in the ascendant, whereas France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal were notice ably on the decline. But what trait common to each group could serve to explain the facts? Race: the Anglo- Saxon nations were still vigorous, while those of "Latin blood" were decadent. The lowest depth of this national despair comes in the eighties and nineties but unmistakable signs are not wanting in the earlier decade of the seventies. Gobineau's illuminating pamphlet on What happened to France in /#70 remained unpublished, but the critical views ex pressed in it were not those of an isolated man, or of a traitor to his country. Like his compatriots Gobineau believed the 1870 disaster unparalleled in history, but he thought that it was due not so much to an exterior enemy as to internal rottenness. He ascribed to national ism a large part of the ill success of the war. National vanity has been France's "Chinese wall" which has kept it closed in and favored the "incubation of the germs which the Gallo-Roman plebs carried necessarily in its bosom" (p. 101). The results have been centralization, étatisme, bourgeois supremacy, corruption and incom petence, and finally disaster. It is an "ethnic fatality" that this should have been so, for "each race finds its food within the circle of its instincts and cannot find it elsewhere. Envy is essentially the malady of the Latin races." Hence their resistless march towards mobocracy. Gobineau protests against the increasing materialism and cynicism of the masses. u On trouve charmant d'être des Français en décadence he exclaims sardonically and, "to the Parisians, the war of 1870 was a Circus—the great passion of the Gallo-Roman mobs." In his pacifism, too, Gobineau reflects faithfully the mind of peasants who returned a monarchical assembly in 1871 in order to have peace at any price. He asserts that after Sedan the Germans showed no hatred against the French, but on the contrary a desire for peace. He denounces the insane propaganda and lies of the press and the false atrocity stories then current as they were to be again in 1914. Gobineau goes farther in his critique of nationalism and the government than do his contem poraries. But the feelings behind the strictures are the same. Gambetta himself, the republican pro-war patriot condemns the levity of the French. More than that, he assumes a parallel race-theory to that of the Count. He praises the Alsatians for energy and tenacity, racial qualities lacking in the French. Gambetta dare not call them Germanic qualities, 1 for the date, May 9, 1872, is too soon after the war. But if "our dear Alsace" was so necessary to French unity "and added invincible en ergy to French frivolity and nobility," what can it mean but that Gambetta adopts Gobineau's Nordic traits? Like him also Gambetta ascribes his own republicanism to race and that race, as for Gobineau, is the "Gallic or plebeian" race. But in Gambetta's eyes, his race and his plebeian origin are "noble." He speaks of the "truly Gallic nature" of Hoche, the revolutionary General, which made him bear his trials with fortitude and seren ity, and says that instead of calling each other liars, traitors, and thieves, the Monarchists and Republicans should attribute the defeat of France to the might of Germany rather than to internal weaknesses. German 1 But Bismarck, flattering from the other side, praises the "Gallic warlike race of Alsace." (June 3, 1871.) versus Gaul serves once again to gloss over more real and fundamental antagonisms. Another witness, Gustave Monod, who was later to be one of the great props of the republican regime, as well as a distinguished historian and educator, cor roborates the conclusions that Gobineau and Gambetta share in common. As a non-combatant hospital-aide Monod could achieve independence of mind and his judgment of the ''deplorable levity of the national char acter" confirms what we knew of the causes predispos ing France to a severe disillusionment. Though chary of generalities, he sees the German's respect for woman hood as "a national quality and source of the strength of the German race." (Allemands et Français,-p. 13.) Other contrasting characters of the Germanic race are its re forming zeal and scientific spirit, but he sees danger in the Germans' taking upon their own account the French doctrine of war as an agent of civilization. The same swollen pride that ruined the French will ruin the Germans. 2 Monod shows very clearly the origin of the French superstition about German "barbarism." At first in 1870, according to him, the French were pleased with the fancy of crossing the Rhine to pillage Ger many, while they were treating their own peasants' persons and property on the whole worse than did the Germans; but when the French were finally defeated their fury vented itself in the form of lies about Ger- 2 Is the Third Reich perhaps only trying to fulfill this prophecy? man atrocities, German savagery, and the violation of the soil. "The vocabulary of the language was not ade quate to the fury of the patriots" (p. 31). Towards the end of the war the French soldiers began to recog nize their inferiority, but they had little influence on the mass of non-combatants, the bulk of the nation, who were to shape the opinion and temper of the next generation. What is known in France as the "generation of '70" consists of those born roughly between i860 and 1880 who came to consciousness in a doubly troubled period of external and internal uncertainty. Among them, the patriotic racialists of the period 1870-1914 were directly affected in their childhood or family environment by some aspect of the war. One witnessed the occupation of his native village by German troops; another vividly remembers the parade of the local soldiery leaving for the front. The families of the many Alsace-Lorrainers were economically or psychologically injured by the German annexation of these provinces. Barrés, Bazin, Bordeaux, Juliette Lamber, Georges Dumesnil, Paul Déroulède, Edouard Schuré, were among those whose racial antipathies had at least one root in the unhealthy soil of war fever and post-war bitterness. The historical aspect of their vituperative chauvinism consists in seeing the Germans as the perpetual invaders of France. France identifies herself mentally with Rome, so that the "crime" of invasion goes back to the bar barians, and the same process of identification makes the modern Germans nothing more than barbarians thinly veneered with civilization. In the words of René Lote, "German Kultur" is only an "enterprise against Latin civilization . . . Germany is a nation void of inventive ness, imitative, secretly afraid of being still a pupil, per haps only a barbarian." ( Les relations Franco-allemandes, p. 75.) Ernest Babelon, a scholar and a member of the French Institute, traces the whole history of the two nations with reference to this hypothesis of barbarism versus civilization. For him, world history hinges on the struggle of the two principles of Romanism and Ger manism. For less erudite publicists and historians like Lasserre, Bainville, Faguet, Maurras, Le Goffic, Lavisse, and Gaillard, philosophers like Bouglé, Boutroux, and Ernest Hello, novelists like Bazin and Bourget, poets like Mistral, Strada and Sully-Prudhomme, politicians like Déroulède, Barrés, Syveton, and Léon Bourgeois, the notion of France as the outpost of civilization beating back the barbarian race has become a "fact," or rather "faith," adhered to in the teeth of all doubts and de nials. "One is a barbarian by birth," said François Combes at the University of Bordeaux in 1870. "Germany is always such to us who are the bulwark of the Latin races." ( Les Invasions, p. 7.) Sixty years later, Maurras was still harping on the same note. "The three historic centers of civilization are Athens, Rome, Paris. All the rest are only satellites." {Gauls, Germans, and Latins, 1926, p. 30.) But whereas the racial basis of this be lief consists for Maurras in the adjunction of Roman order to Celtic vigor and brilliancy, the racial com ponents of culture differ widely in other writers. Adrien Mithouard, for example, thinks the region known as the Ile de France the cradle of what is truly French because it is free from Roman influence. However serviceable this creed of anti-barbarism, it presented difficulties which well-informed men, though prejudiced, were obliged to perceive. The Germans of the nineteenth century were not going about dressed in goatskins, living in huts and plundering their neighbors for subsistence from day to day. Germany had an impos ing cultural past. Mozart, 3 Beethoven, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, could not be utterly overlooked except by ig norant or absolutely single-tracked minds. To this dif ficulty there were two solutions. One was to say that these great men were spurious values, that German poetry "reeks of death and disease" and that Beethoven's music "arouses vague thoughts and harmful desires and corresponds to no reality." The other was to grant the genuineness of the art, but to demonstrate that it was due almost entirely to French influence. It was easy to pick out Goethe's French masters—he acknowledges them himself—and it was convenient to forget that he acknowl- 3 It is curious how infrequently Mozart is mentioned by French nationalist writers among German geniuses to be accounted for on racial grounds. Is this due to the French look and sound of his name, not quite a rime to beaux-arts nor to musard, but easily "French" just the same? edges other masters belonging to other nations includ ing his own. In any case, both solutions leave France, as the rep resentative of the Latin race, the standard bearer of civilization, and justify equally a political and a cultural animosity against the unteachable barbarian. It also pro vides a neat device for reinterpreting history. The fifty- odd invasions of Germany by Gauls or French that oc curred between the fifth century b.c . and the nineteenth century a.D ., especially the brutal devastations of the Thirty Years' War and the wars of Louis XIV are written off to the account of civilizing the barbarian, whereas corresponding irruptions of Franks into Gaul or Germans into France are simply primitive vandalism. The full beauty of this system does not appear, how ever, until one realizes its utility for fighting home battles as well as external quarrels. By setting in opposition the Latin "classical" civilization against the barbarian, it is possible for this type of French nationalist to empty the vials of contempt upon the cosmopolitan France of the eighteenth century, the Revolution which came out of it, and the Romanticist flowering of culture that fol lowed the Revolution. Mme de Staël, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Berlioz, Michelet, and their contemporaries are stigmatized as un-French, "enamored of foreign litera tures," and cosmopolitan in outlook. They are accused of treason for having abandoned the great classical tradi tion, and of misrepresentation for having admired prod ucts of German thought and art. Generally, their "racial descent" is investigated and their mothers, cousins or aunts held responsible for their sins. It never occurs to the accusers that the "classical" tradition was also based on an infatuation for foreign literatures—the Latin and Italian; or that to admire the works of Kant and Schiller is not to make oneself an accessory before the fact to whatever "atrocities" may have occurred in the Franco-Prussian war. But the process of tribal identifica tion, the hallmark of the racialist, necessarily holds all the members of a group responsible for the acts of a part, and extends the group in space and time to include all the ancestors and possible descendants of the "alien race." In view of the equally keen imperialistic rivalry which existed between France and England during the same period, it may be asked why the same intellectual animus did not develop. The answer is that it did in some quar ters, at least until the definite alignment of France with England following the Fashoda incident of 1898. The "racial" connection between England and France through the Celts and Normans did much to allay the tender susceptibilities of French racial nationalists. Again and again, Shakespeare is adopted by the French writers as "one of our own Celts." It is the stock reply to the Germans' " Unser Shakespeare ." In addition, the move ment towards pan-Saxonism had not yet reached full power in England. Although English opinion was pre ponderantly on the side of Prussia in the Franco-Prus sian war, the sympathy rested not so much on a feeling of kinship with the Germans as on traditional disap proval of the Bonapartes and a present distaste for Na poleon Ill's diplomacy. The voices of Carlyle and Free man were not powerful enough to sway the multitudes to a blind Germanism. There was still too much knowl edge and reasonableness behind their utterances, and it took the simpler slogans of a Cecil Rhodes to entrench the idea of "We Anglo-Saxons." In Germany, Bismarck's policy tended after 1880 to the conciliation of the French, lest continued frustration lead to a war of revenge. In his willingness to allow France her proper sphere of influence, Bismarck used the accepted dogmas of race to indicate the basis for his leniency: "Thanks to a stronger mixture of German blood the French people is the most powerful of Ro mance nations. Therefore it can claim a right to a posi tion of leading civilizing power in the Romance world, as well as outside Europe. If France wants to extend her base of operations in accordance with her interests, she can count on our non-interference and even on our support, if we are not harmed thereby. Express our view that, in the impending appointment of General Cialdini to Paris, we see little to disturb us in this approach of Italy to France, but rather the natural expression of Ro mance relationship." (Despatch to Hohenlohe, April 8. 1880; Grosse Politik, III, pp. 395-6.) The official press that took its tone from the chancel lor was balanced by a group of anti-French publicists whose views and tempers are on the whole identical with those of the nationalists across the Rhine save for the exact reversal of the adjectives French and German. An excellent collection of their beliefs and grievances was made in 1916—again for a belligerent purpose—by W. W. Whitelock and published under the title "Modern Ger many." One citation is enough to indicate the contents: "Only by utterly disregarding the deep-lying differences in the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin conceptions of democ racy and of the strong aesthetic and temperamental dif ferences between the Anglo-Saxon and Romance peoples, can one conceive of Western civilization as identical with the democratic ideal of freedom, progress and hu manity. . . . Despite the German's yearning for the sunny South, the Northern Gothic germ is in his blood. . . . This explains the fundamental dissimilarities be tween the Germans and the Latin races. . . . This finds ample expression in the present Kultur war and in the minds of many forms the basis for the charges of bar barism. . . (Professor Ernst Troeltsch, pp. 66, 80.) Neither in France nor in Germany did the mutual an tagonism attached to race-catchwords meet with any obstruction. The liberals and radicals of both countries were too often suspected of disloyalty to their home land for them to risk compromising their internal poli cies by tilting against the Protean myth of race. Besides, too often did liberals and socialists harbor race-prejudices of another sort. The liberal sublimated his race-antago nisms by discriminating against individual artists or think ers. The socialist, compelled to love his European brothers, indulged in animus against the yellow or black proletarian who competed unfairly against him ten thou sand miles away by accepting lower wages and longer hours. As for the masses of unthinking readers, racial anti- Germanism or anti-Slavism acted as a comforting drug in a period of greater and greater insecurity. Herd-re sponses were organized by interested groups while eco nomic even more than political frustration found a vent in the wholesale insulting of "enemy" nations. By pro viding an inherent unchanging ground for contempt, race served better than any other notion to relieve the fury of impotence. This was especially so in France where national weakness and isolation remained a psychi cal fact until the dawning of the Anglo-French entente in the new century. That sense of collective inferiority and its compensatory animus suggest an unmistakable resemblance to modern-day Nazi race-propaganda. What France needed psychologically after 1871 was what Germany yearned for after the humiliating Treaty of Versailles—reassurance about her own importance in the world, and a comforting faith that should place her once more on good terms with herself. Renan had counseled strengthening the hatred of the Slav for the German in 1871, but the "natural affinity" of Celts and Slavs did not bear fruit till 1891. Meantime the desire for racial pride contributed in large measure to the suc cess of General Boulanger's dictatorship movement in the eighties. As Drumont, the Jew-baiter, put it, "We want an imperator, a master, a leader, but he must first win a battle against Germany." (La Fin d'un Monde, p. 317.) In hatred there was a kind of strength. The reactionary novelist Bourget, writing for the commemo ration of the historian Fustel de Coulanges, testifies that the man's importance lay in "having taught us to shake off the yoke of German thought." He destroyed "the idea of the Gallo-Romans being enslaved by Germany" and provided a "reassuring doctrine" to the young men of the post-1870 generation. The fact that Fustel aimed at being a "scientific" historian and arrived at his con clusions by a different route from that of his national istic readers did not embarrass Bourget and his compeers. The need for race-solidarity and race-hatred swept all scruples aside. Foreign, alien, outsider, are the words of opprobrium that come up most often in the general literature of the period 1870-1914. A veritable xeno phobia animated the conservative and reactionary ranks in all countries, to such a degree that it forced the lib erals and radicals also to disavow "foreign" influences, according to the usual pattern of political action when bidding for popular support. But the curious thing is that not only were foreign things foreign to these fanatics of all complexions, but the things of which they disapproved at home became necessarily foreign too. The Dreyfus Affair in France was simply the dramatized and internal manifestation of all this "thinking." III Cornelius Herz is a foreigner, a cosmopolite of hostile race, of German origin, whom the accident of being born in France cannot make French— barrés DISAPPOINTED in their tribal desire for national glory, disappointed in their personal desire for leader ship in France, and also generously distressed at the mediocrity and corruption incidental to a democratic republic, many intelligent persons, born between i860 and 1880, formed around the turn of the century the various groups since known as UAction Française, La Ligue de la Patrie Française, La Ligue des Patriotes, La Ligue Latino-slave, and others. The same elements pub lished newspapers, among which must be included La Cocarde, La Gazette de France, La Revue du Monde Latin, and UAction Française itself, the whole forming very energetic headquarters for propaganda, discussion and criticism, whose tendencies were nationalist, Catho lic, conservative, and royalist. Despite their admittedly small number they influenced a considerable body of opinion and attracted within their orbits on the issue of nation and race many writers and intellectuals who did not accept their various political programs. The principal racial argument of this contingent as expressed by Maurras is that France is governed by four "foreign nations"—the Jews, the Protestants, the Free masons, and the métèques (i.e., resident foreigners whether naturalized or not). {Enquête sur la Monarchie, p. xxii.) The implication is that most "true Frenchmen are strangers in their own home." These men "molded by twenty centuries of a life shared in common" are un like any others in the world, even though Celtic, Ro man, and Greek elements were fused in the formation of their race. The twenty centuries of common life sound a little suspicious coming from a royalist strong on the caste idea, but let that pass. The important point is Maurras's mystic belief that "France existed before the Franks" and that "the Gallo-Roman type is the start ing point and explanation of the French type." {Gauls, German, and Latins, p. 7.) From this thesis it follows that any German, Jewish, or other foreign blood (save only the Greek) is inassimilable and harmful. For ex ample, Maurras's friend the poet Moréas, whose real name was Papadiamantopoulous, is thoroughly French, being a Greek, and can be the restorer of the true French tradition in poetry, but Rousseau, being a Protestant and a "lunatic from Geneva" is accounted un-French. This juggling with race-epithets to cover up nearer hatreds was not new in France, and it does not take an historian writing at a distance to perceive the continu ity. Anatole France discussing politics at the turn of the century complained that anti-Semitism and race- prejudice were as old in France as the monarchy itself. {Opinions Sociales, pp. 62, 113, 116, and Pref. to Speeches of Prime Minister Combes , p. v.) The undig nified incidents that occurred at the inauguration of the statues of Renan at Tréguier and of Vercingetorix at Clermont-Ferrand show the wide range of the animosi ties involved, both before, during and after the Drey fus Affair. The Dreyfus Affair or, as it was and is still known in France, simply the Affair, exhibited the full force of race-hysteria that we have come to associate with Nazi Germany. The only difference was that the anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, anti-Protestant group did not fully control the government and therefore could not give full vent to its persecuting mania. Better than all the arguments, the Affair shows the split between the two Frances, both as a cause and as a result. It was anti-republicanism that gave to the racial superstition its driving force and it was the democratic and republican forces that first yielded, then rallied, and finally checked the threatened proscriptions. As usual in French politics, the conflict was made vivid by the clash of personalities. Dreyfus was obviously the accidental hero-victim of a drama whose action began before the first act. Drumont, the versatile journalist author of La France Juive and ha Fin (Tun Monde , led the racial-minded ultra-nationalists: Léon Daudet, Maurras, the Army, the Royalists, and many Catholics who for the time being forgot the ortho dox commandment of universal fraternity to indulge in the sin of vindictiveness. On the other side, the novelists Zola and Anatole France, the republican historians with Monod and Aulard at their head, Clémenceau and all the radicals and liberals descended from Gambetta, fought for the maintenance of the Third Republic and the Rights of Man. The evenness of the contest in a sense prolonged the "atrocities" which, though not remarkably bloody, were none the less cruel. The Affair not only showed the fundamental rift in the nation, it extended it by reach ing down into the smaller units, friendships, marriages, families, partnerships—every conceivable human relation felt the pressure. Sides must be taken. The issues being complex and often incompatible with one another, the idea of race came to the rescue. The hesitant was jock eyed into partisanship with expostulation: "You can't be for the Jews!" Or a reputation was settled with, "We no longer see him: he's a Protestant and a Freemason." It was made explicit that Protestantism and Freemasonry were the result of race just as Marxism or international ism in Nazi Germany is taken as a sign of blood. In this French "civil war" which lasted from 1898 to 1906, the race-arguments followed the common pat tern of generalizing ahead of the facts and without re gard for consistency, the plausibility arising not from the facts, but from a convention about them. For ex ample: (a) the ills of France were due to the Jews; (b) the Jews were all Germans and sold French military secrets to the land whence they had got their names of Stein, Meyer, Reinach; but (c) many of the ills of France were due to big finance; (d) all financiers were Jews and all Jews were financiers; they chose the busi ness because it appealed to their unscrupulous tendencies, among which was (e) their lack of national loyalty to any people; their preference for their own racial kin across the borders; their insatiable lust for gain. Of course (f) the Jews were the cause of all social unrest for they were indolent paupers plotting in Ghettos, (g) All socialists were Jews and all Jews were socialists; they were an unstable, emotional, and neurotic race (h) which explained their being artists, especially musicians, and professional men. (i) In their latter capacity they were devoid of all feelings, over-intellectualized, dry and dialectical, whence their preference for finance and so cialism. When occasion required, this circle of beliefs included Protestants, atheists, Freemasons, and foreigners. If a notorious example was advanced to disprove the sup posed rule—for example, of a rapacious Catholic banker or a "pure-blooded" socialist—the racialists were not in the least fazed: "Race speaks through the instincts, hence that Catholic must be a Jew; that Socialist must be a foreigner," and with a shrewd look of supernatural wis dom, "I'll wager that if you went back far enough you'd find one of his ancestors, who, etc." Evolution had supplied the word "atavism" and it did yeoman service on these occasions. Even a calm and just man like Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, in a course of lectures delivered in 1902 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes for the very purpose of abating the seething hatreds, could not repress the urge to speak of the "atavistic sur vivals" causing the present-day struggles. He suggested also that anti-Semitism and race-doctrines were "a Teu tonic product." To be sure, he blames Renan for his Aryan-Semite discrimination and he analyzes with true insight the complex interplay of passions and grudges that animated the clashing groups in France, but he fails to connect the two sets of facts; he does not see that to call race-prejudice a Teutonic product does not explain it away. Blaming Renan is quite just, but why did anti-Semitism spread in Germany and why did Renan elaborate his theory? The problem has only been pushed back one step. Leroy-Beaulieu tries to solve it by refer ring race to environment and adopting Taine's view of race. ( Doctrines de Haine , pp. 9; 12-13.) Despite his inadequacy on the side of explanation, Leroy-Beaulieu gives a fair picture of the intricacy of race-prejudices during the Affair: "What does the anti-Semite say? He says: France is Aryan; France is Christian. Down with the Jews! Down with the Semitic spirit which de-nationalizes the French spirit and destroys national unity. "What does the anti-Protestant say? He says: France is Latin, France is Catholic. Down with the Huguenots and Protestants; down with the Germanic or Genevese spirit which mars the French spirit and destroys its unity. Lastly, what does the anti-clerical say? He says: Mod ern France is a daughter of the Revolution and of Free thought. Down with Rome and the Jesuits, down with the clericals and reactionaries who dare oppose the France of the past to the new France, and who prevent the modern French spirit from building anew the spirit ual unity of the nation" (pp. 285-6). Besides an intensification of nationalism in the con ventional racial terms, the Affair had graver results: it bred the conviction that the internal difficulties of France were due to the treasonable practices of Frenchmen who had sold themselves to the enemy. " Vendu à F ennemi" has been in modern France as terrible a phrase as the famous cry of "Outlaw" during the Revolutionary pe riod. The former means ostracism as surely as the second meant death. 4 Gobineau in the '70's had already sarcasti cally deplored the French tradition of "crying treason." It is not exclusively a "French trait," for it is the urge in every human individual to find some external cause for his faults in order to relieve himself of responsibility for them. In France, the solid citizens were confident that "if only the foreigners could be annihilated" the garden of Eden would bloom anew on Gallic soil. A witness before the High Court that retried Dreyfus de clared in all seriousness that "true Frenchmen were in a minority in France," a belief inciting to civil war through its corollary that the true Frenchmen must ex- 4 In this regard see the career of Joseph Caillaux after 1912 when his policy of conciliation with Germany became suspect in the eyes of nationalists. terminate the false, in the best manner of Hitlerism. How Hitlerism antedates Hitler in a general way must be already apparent. A closer look at race-discussions in the Germany of William II will confirm that fact. Chapter IX. RACE AND THE NATIONALIS TIC WARS: 1900-1914 I Degenerescence is a physiological term alto gether incapable of rating the psychological value of a people— richard dehmel, 1904 THE combination of racialism, militarism, and cultural nationalism that our generation thinks an innovation of the Nazis is in reality an old attitude that found per fect expression thirty years ago or more in Imperial Germany. It was made up of disparate elements bor rowed from other nations—abundantly from France, as has been shown, but also from England and from Ger many's own past. Just as French racialism can be traced back to the Renaissance through Boulainvilliers, Hot- man, and Bodin, so German racial pretensions of a po litical character can be found in Conring 1 in the mid dle of the seventeenth century. But in both cases, the germ is small compared to the ravages of the disease. Misunderstood romanticism furnished to modern Ger mans the same elements for building up an aggressive na tionalism as in France, and Herder, Kant, and Goethe often appear in German racial literature as the august 1 De habitus corporum Germanicorum. See also J. Barzun, op. cit., pp. 59-84. sponsors of a petty animosity. Wagner, Nietzsche, Chamberlain, 2 Paul de Lagarde (the pseudonym of Paul Bötticher, 1827-1891), and Wilhelm II stand as the nearer masters, while Gobineau's lively ghost plays in and out of tune with the new German racial song of the turn of the century. Its burden may be examined in an anonymous pamphlet of considerable popularity pub lished in 1904 and entitled: The Kaiser, Culture and Art; Considerations on the future of the German people:, from the Papers of an Irresponsible. Not all racialists are so self-conscious or honest in describing themselves. This particular one turned out to be George Fuchs, an educated man and a capable writer, who significantly betrays the same lack of assurance about Germany that France was displaying about her own culture at the same time. Fuchs envies England and wishes that the German people had the same cultural unity as the Eng lish—"not on an intellectual but on a popular plane, a shaping force appropriate to the genius of the race. . . . The influence on the instincts of the masses which Eng lish culture undoubtedly exerts, although the Anglo- Saxon masses are on the average cruder and less edu cated than the German, depends rather on this, that the sanie creative power of the Race appears as the de- 2 The "renegade Englishman's" Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1890-1) has been so often attacked and cited and is so much a compilation of ideas from Gobineau, Wagner, Renan, Drumont, and Lapouge that no new paraphrase seems called for here. termining principle in all matters and functions" (pp. 9-10). Theodore Roosevelt earns Fuchs's praise for see ing that Americani^ must precede American power, and the adaptation of that principle to Germany is the well-known axiom that war is the purchase-price of Cul ture (p. 13). Hence no disarmament, no international ism, no humanitarianism. Race-connection rests on Blood, not language or sentiment, and outside the nar row circle of race, no sympathies can survive. "The Huguenots would never have become completely Ger man, they would have remained among us a foreign body, like the Jews, had there been no Frankish blood in their veins and no Celtic blood in ours" (p. 24). Fuchs repudiates the notion of a pure race, and goes to the trouble of saying that Gobineau's use of the term has been discredited by research, but Fuchs's distinc tion is largely Pickwickian. He follows the Gobinian and philological traditions in handling the Aryan, Celtic, and other race-questions involved in the history of Rome, the French Revolution, and the nineteenth cen tury (p. 31). Like Gobineau he is anti-liberal, anti- revolutionary, anti-modern. He has nothing but con tempt for the modern man who is "without Race and without culture" as well as for the fruits of machine civilization—"the telephone, telegraph, water-closet, elec tric light and modern music" (p. 35). This combination of antipathies will seem familiar to those who have read Hitler's views on art posted in every German theater and concert-hall, or who recall his Party-Day speeches at Nürnberg in 1933. As Fuchs proceeds he becomes more and more sym bolic and mystical in his explanation of the workings of race. Race becomes Rhythm and "culture is nothing more than the most reckless ( rücksichtsloseste ) applica tion of the Rhythm of one's own people-hood in all things" (p. 17). Some aliens, like the Mendelssohns, "have caught the rhythm of our blood and are true race- fellows" (p. 42) but generally it is impossible to "break into the magic of blood-rhythm," of which culture is the expression. Fuchs's admiration of William II leads him to consider the German army as the true type of modern culture, and he reminds us on every page that "every culture is bought with blood." Words from Goethe are pulled out of context to support the assertion that the future of the German people is on the sea; whereby both branches of the service are awarded their cultural cer tificate (pp. 88-89). Culture in its narrow sense of fine art, Fuchs deals with in a fashion observers of modern Germany will recognize: art must elevate and encourage to ideals, not depress and criticize. There is no solution to the social and economic question save through racial-rhythmic order and culture. Hence Jewish art or indeed any dis integrating art must be abolished. War against the Nat uralistic school of writers and all un-German modernism is the order of the day, and the statesmanlike William II disdains no means of propaganda, including the theater, to achieve this end. Science of course is for Fuchs no more international than art, and just as Goethe's second Faust closes on the apotheosis of the civil-engineer, so Fuchs, misquoting Liebig's fine saying that science is ninety-nine percent art, concludes that Berlin, as the center of scientific civilization today is the first city in the world. Not much has changed and less has been added in thirty years. Fuchs himself was no originator and it is only necessary to read Paris for Berlin, to substitute instinct for rhythm, keeping the omnibus word blood, to recognize in this popular treatise the nth sample of the old dogma. It would do very well as a tract from the present minister of propaganda, except that it is bet ter presented and more meaty than the current Goebbels delicatessen. The modern palate for this kind of dish is a shade less exacting, it seems, than a generation ago. Even in those more discriminating days it must have been amusing to bring side by side the "proofs" of race- theories for verification. If after reading Fuchs one turned to Heinrich Driesmans' Cultural History of the Race-Instincts, z for example, one discovered that the beginning of modern decadence dates from Goethe, who was no creator but a weakling. "Goethe's poetic art is an art of decline and dissolution." (I, p. 15.) Since Goethe's death, as Victor Hehn observes, German art 3 Leipzig, 1898-1901, 3 vols. has seen "the Jewish epoch—witty, cynical, undra- matic, impotent." The usual denunciation of mediocrity, utilitarianism, and materialism follows, in the most ap proved Gobinian style. A shift in racial qualities must be noted, however. In Gobineau, art arises only from the contact of two or more races. In Driesmans, despite some hedging on the point (II, pp. vii-viii), the Aryans are self-sufficient, artistically as well as in other ways. "The real difference between the Aryan and Jewish peoples," says Driesmans, "is that the former have a sense of form and the latter have not." (I, p. 23.) In the history of race-doctrines combining anthro pology, politics, and culture, Driesmans represents the stage of transition between Nietzsche, Darwin, and Gobineau on the one hand, and Freud, 4 Spengler, and Nazism on the other. Heine, reacting against the puritan- ism of his co-religionists, had divided mankind into Jews and Hellenes, according to temperament and not ac cording to birth. Matthew Arnold had followed suit and Nietzsche had used the terms Dionysian and Apollonian to separate the creative-passionate from the critical-ra tional. Spengler splits natures and cultures into the Faustian and the Apollonian. Driesmans reverts to Heine's dichotomy and calls the ascetic, fanatical, and puritan, Nazarenes, and these share the author's con tempt with the "brainless Celts." The latter's conquest by the Franks, who were "German with something 4 See Driesmans, I, p. 176 seq., II, vi, where art is shown as the sublimation of the sex-impulse. Asiatic in them" made of them "a people of acrobats, musicians, brokers and comedians." (II, p. 10.) Histori cal examples are ready to hand: the rape of Helen shows a Semitic trait typical of Aryan-Semite relations, at the same time as Richelieu is maltreated for being a Gaul and a mountebank—the same Richelieu that Ludwig Woltmann, the "political anthropologist" was shortly to extol as a great German in his book of discoveries, The Germans in Frcmce (pp. 88 seq.). The desire to connect one's own race to the ancient Greeks, already seen in Maurras and other French self- praising racialists, also moves Driesmans, who discovers in the Athenians a Nordic folk. Their racial hatred of the Spartans (puritanical Nazarenes) is a test of their superiority, as is the fact that they "gave an art-form to their acquired sensuality." Modern German racialists have changed these views on the relative merits of sen suality and asceticism, but in 1904 Driesmans was still under the influence of Nietzsche. Since France was the Celtic enemy to be feared, Dries mans eruditely reviews French history on the lines that Boulainvilliers laid down exactly 200 years before—a witness to the enduring power of ideas—but he over reaches himself in a piece of unconscious humor worth recording. He has just told us in condemning Richelieu's clowning that the true German is serious {ernsthaft) ; now he wishes to take credit for lighter virtues. "Irony," he says gravely, "self-mockery are deep-grained Aryan and especially German traits." " Solche Selbst-ironie ist arisch, urarisch (II, p. 22.) The Celts have not only the faults of inferior persons, they are also a social men ace. Their "mobility," feeling of inferiority (and pre sumably lack of urarisch Selbst-ironie) , make them revo lutionary, liberal, democratic anarchists. They are the makers of the modern destructive literature, nationalism, and of the socialist novel. Daudet (Père), Zola, Maupas sant are the counterpart of Racine and Corneille, and no better proof of the Celtic-Nordic race-compound in the French people could be found than the significant type of tragi-comedy produced by Molière and Maupas sant. Shakespeare on the other hand was ever "ein Ger mane von Grund axis . . . echt Sächsisch (II, pp. 47-8.) But the capacity to give form to his aspirations, and to become a great artist, was not in his nature. Was it be cause "Saxon" betokens low-German or because Shake speare was born in England? Driesmans says much in this Cultural History but he does not tell us that. He merely asks rhetorically, "What dramatist or plastic artist has Low Germany, Holland or England ever pro duced?" The Germany of William II was willing to make the query a challenge to England and extend it to France and Russia if need be. A handful of socialists and poets alone tried to go against the stream of official and na tional arrogance. The Kaiser himself subsidized Cham berlain's book for wide distribution, read Fuchs and Gobineau, and set the fashion of what might be called the scientifically-justified pride of race. II Briand = Brandt— woltmann THE Emperors, politicians, and litterateurs who used race as a weapon in their own particular game during the era of nationalism had an easier time than their prede cessors, for they did not have to rely on their own in ventions or researches. The contemporary schools of thought furnished ready-made an article that with a few alterations here and there, fitted almost as well as the previous custom-made doctrines. Among those schools of thought, two can be picked out as pre-eminent—an- throposociology and Group-psychology. The "science" of anthroposociology flourished in France, England, and Germany between the eighties and the World War as still another movement of reaction against socialism and democracy. Its chief exponents were G. Vacher de Lapouge and Henri Mufïang in France, Lucien Chalumeau in Switzerland, C. C. Clos- son in the United States, O. Ammon, L. Gumplowicz and, with political divergences, Ludwig Woltmann in Germany. The groundwork of the science was the fa miliar craniometry and its superstructure was a mass of historical, aesthetic, and social judgments more or less ably propped up by the usual type of research. The anthroposociologists recognized Gobineau as their mas- ter, Darwin as their prophet, and Paul Broca as their mainstay. From Gobineau they derived the idea that race ex plains all social and cultural phenomena; from Darwin they borrowed the notion that the natural selection of fit types ensures the continuance of the best possible race, despite the doubt Darwin casts on the permanence of races and species. As a matter of fact, no doubts of any kind disturbed the anthroposociologists. They be lieved in evolution as well as in fixed races. They distin guished those races by skull measurements, following the technique made usual by Broca, and arrived at a subdivi sion of the whites into three races: Homo Europaeus, dolichocephalic, tall, and blond—the "ideal Englishman"; Homo Alpinus, brachycephalic, shorter than Homo Europaeus, and dark—the Turk or Auvergnat; Homo Mediterraneus, dolichocephalic, of varying stature, and dark—the Neapolitan or Andalusian. The Homo Euro paeus is of course the Aryan, and the fated conqueror of all other races from earliest times. He is the pushing, active, brainy element that builds our modern industrial enterprises and creates our cities. The cranial statistics of city and country have a great importance for the anthroposociologists. Lapouge in Montpellier, Beddoe and Broca in England, Muffang in Northern France, Ammon in Baden, Nicolucci and Sergi in Italy, Col- lignon in Paris had assiduously gathered figures which were used to show that the city operated a natural selec tion upon the population by attracting to it all the energetic dolichos and leaving the brachys behind. The usual inaccuracy prevails in the use of the terms dolicho and brachy. Ranging from 62 to 98, the indexes are grouped by each author according to his fancy. We find, for example, in Ammon, 5 that in Milan, the index 83.8 represents dolichocephalism compared to the country's 84.3; whereas in Freiburg and Karlsruhe 83.5 is the rural brachycephalic index opposed to 81.8-81.2 for the urban dolichos; and in the regions north, south, and east of Paris, the rural index averages between 82.6 and 83.1. So that the dolichos of one place are cranially identical with the brachys of another. The color of the hair plays a very secondary rôle in this complicated subject. The "scientists" themselves are the first to discredit hair- pigmentation, chiefly because it plays hob with their generalizations. They are nevertheless compelled to use it whenever they wish to differentiate an Aryan from a Mediterranean. This see-sawing of opinion is only one of the wonders of the new science. The sociological part of the discipline comes in with what the American enthusiast, C. C. Closson, called Ammon's Law, though its elements are already found in Lapouge and in Gobineau. Stated grandiloquently, it asserts that the class struggle is nothing but an uncon scious race-struggle between the Brachys—an old, con servative, pacific, and reflective people, and the Dolichos —new, restless, and adventurous. The outcome of the 5 Anthroposociol., p. 22 seq. struggle is not in doubt, for as we know from earliest times, the tall blonds have been destined to own the world. In spite of the Law, every one of the anthropo- sociologists betrays great anxiety lest that ownership be contested by the short brunets. To be sure race is su preme and its effects are unavoidable, but . . . but we must do something quickly or the Unconquerable Race will be wiped off the face of the earth. So Lapouge fears that the "eugenics"—the Aryan cream of the population, will be diluted out of existence; Ammon speaks gravely of a possible Ary ctnendämmerung, the twilight of the Aryans, which would come not from their individual, but from their numerical weakness. The same absurdities obtain in these writers' political views. That socialism and democracy should be their common enemies is no matter for surprise. The majority of educated men during the period were overwhelmed by disgust for the leveling down, the ugliness, and the confusion resulting from industrialism and political de mocracy, and these perceptions seemed to lead to only two alternatives—reaction or revolution. Revolution meant trying to organize, to educate, to abolish in a better system the formless and hopeless proletarian masses. Reaction could take many forms. In France Royalism was only one remedy; in Europe at large social Darwinism and anthroposociology were similar solutions. Both asserted the essential fitness of whatever survived. Yet the presence of natural forces regulating the social system did not seem to save it from revolutionary up heaval. Strangely enough, the brachys were accused by the anthroposociologists of being both an old conserva tive, unimaginative race of slaves and the chief makers of revolution. They were held to be poor individualists, anxious for a paternalistic state that would relieve them of responsibilities while robbing them of freedom. To achieve it they would upset the present order. Hence Ammon admires Bismarck, probably for his anti-socialist legislation, but how can he condone his paternalism? Carlyle's feudalism commends itself to the anthropo sociologists because it requires an aristocracy of birth, and Darwin's free-for-all state of nature seen through Herbert Spencer's eyeglass is their ideal society, but still they complain of the lasting powers of the brachys, their absorbing and debilitating effect on the dolichos. More over, the name of the revolutionist race varies at every turn. Driesmans blames the Celto-Mongols, Chamberlain the Jews, Lapouge the Homo Alpinus. That same rev olutionist race is praised by Woltmann as pure German, but if we look on Deniker's map, the Homo Alpinus is the reactionary Breton, the Chouan of La Vendée who fought for God and King in 1793. The reader may be excused for losing the thread of the argument. Indeed he comes perilously near to losing his mind, wondering just what these race-ridden "sci entists" really mean and want. That no talent should be wasted is no doubt one of their noblest aims, but their suggestions for securing that end seem naïve. Besides, is not democracy one form of the free-for-all that they advocate? Ammon calls mathematics to his aid and dem onstrates by the law of combinations that if in respect of any human faculty the best is twelve times superior to the poorest and if eight faculty-groups are involved in the individual make-up, then there is only one superior man among 429,981,686 people. Fascinated by this exact figure, Ammon entirely overlooks the fact that at that rate there would be only 3.5 superior men existing in the world at any one time. He argues further that the availability of qualities in men is even rarer than his figures allow, for the chance of many great gifts concur ring in the same person is much less. The formula, we should be glad to know is: y = YhV^ anc } we are referred to Galton—himself a "comparative racialist" of the Spen- cerian school—for the comforting thought that no true genius is misappreciated, genius being what survives and flourishes in a Darwinian world. To make a practical use of these computations, according to Ammon, is simple: the vote ought to be given according to the probable occurrence of genius; less cryptically put, nine million moderately gifted Germans should be empowered to select 400 men out of the best 2,728. It ought not, says the new Lycurgus, to be difficult. When it comes to historical retrospects, the anthropo- sociologists are subject to the usual infirmities of the his torians and politicians. The anthroposociological use of Celt, Gaul, Aryan, and Frank is as arbitrary as theirs and serves to prove points in passing which do not jibe with later or earlier generalizations. For Ammon the French Gauls are dolicho Aryans and the French Celts are a branch of the Aryan race and therefore dolichocephalic (p. 31 n.). In Southern France, he tells us elsewhere, the dolicho element comes from the Aryan Franks, Bur- gundians, and Celts, and not from the Mediterranean race which is also dolichocephalic but not so tall and quite dark (p. 22). The rest of Europe is similarly peopled out of hand by our author, who relies now on Beddoe, now on Lapouge, now on Houzé, without seeing that a compilation of originally inconsistent no menclatures can only give a medley of meaningless asser tions. Nevertheless the "results" obtained by anthroposoci- ology permeated the literature on social subjects. All but two or three 6 of the "pure" anthropologists accepted Ammon and Lapouge. They were favorably reviewed in the leading scientific and other journals. The non- anthropological sociologists, Tarde, Durkheim and Fouil lée used their results. In the one year 1896 no less than thirty works on, or of, anthroposociology appeared in Paris. (Rev. Ec. Anthrop., 1899, p. 250.) The doctrine served everybody. Against feminism it was urged that women and children are more dolichocephalic than men. Hence the inadvisability of woman suffrage on the as sumption that since apes and Negroes are dolicho the possession of a long skull shows an "atavism" to savagery. (Fouillée, Psych., p. 124.) Against urbanization, pro- 6 Principally Virchow, Manouvrier, and de Quatrefages. tective tariffs, and socialization; against philanthropy, pacifism, and a conciliatory diplomacy; against modern art and exotic art (Negro and Japanese), the certitudes of anthroposociology were good ammunition. At the same time, its intricacies repelled a good many general readers, who went to other sources for the satis faction of the same emotional needs. Several schools of sociology vied with each other for public assent, among them the Science Sociale expounded by the anglomaniacs Henri de Tourville and Edmond Demolins; and the psy chological sociology of Gabriel Tarde and Gustave LeBon. Tarde's system, definitely the most popular in France and Europe around 1900, represents a compro mise method of dealing with the race-doctrine. As one of the interpreters of mass psychology, he is inclined to accept the concept of race for the group and to deny it for the individual. According to him, Gobineau, Taine, Renan, Ammon, Lapouge have been right in stressing the importance of race, but they have misunderstood its function. ( Grande Revue, Nov. i, 1900.) Their "pro found views" are misapplied when they seek to define the mental limits of the individual by his physiological type or to predict the possibilities of the group: "They believed there was a narrow path of opportunities for each race, when these are on the contrary infinite; they confused the incapacity of certain races to invent with that of adapting the inventions of others. The awaken ing of the Far East has disproved this narrow belief" (p. 321). Tarde combats Lapouge and Ammon in the dolicho-brachy realm by citing examples, a method that always leaves the opposition unscathed, for all examples can be discounted as exceptions or simply challenged in point of fact. But Tarde shows no desire to attack race as a superstition. Between the extremes of cold and warm climate, he believes, there is for each race a point of highest impressionability of minds. Race and size are factors in "sociability," and the resulting "inter-mental" action, so important in explaining social phenomena, is therefore "a function of the race-constant" (p. 305 seq.). Despite his inability to correlate genius with "purity of blood," he asserts that "the Latins are less patient, though better artisans than the Anglo-Saxons" (p. 328). In other words, the habit of race-thinking persists under his verbal casting-oif. It reappears in his notion of cer tain groups of men being inventive and others imitative, as if the quality were an ingredient always to be found in stated quantity in particular places, and some men were inventive about everything they did, never imi tative. Tarde's judgment on the Far East and the Latins and Anglo-Saxons shows that he is engaged in nothing more than erecting recent history into axioms: Japan gets westernized—clearly an imitative race; England ex ports more pig-iron than the rest of the world, quite so: the Anglo-Saxons are a patient race; France still leads in handicraft and luxury products, no wonder: the Latins are such fine artisans (pp. 327-30). Tarde's conclusion is on the whole internationalist. The "families of the great Aryan race" show a wide diversity of talents and achievements, but they have all done their bit. "The locomotive," says he poetically, "is the handiwork of all the human races together." He ad vocates a European entente, else there will be a torrent of blood, which will overwhelm conquerors and con quered in one ultimate destruction. Plenty of "races of prey" still exist, so let selection make for balance and diversity, not uniformity of type. {Ibid.) Not long after this pronouncement, in May, 1901, Tarde spoke at Bordeaux on the mooted decadence of the Latin races. 7 The air was now heavy with fears of English hegemony and remembered hate of Germany's "crime of 1870." Tarde reviewed and refuted the usual alarmist accounts of Latin inferiority—Catholicism, com- munalism, classical studies, backward industry, and racial blood-mixture. He cheered up the "Latins" assembled before him by telling them that their individualistic mili tary genius would surely triumph in a war with organ ized masses, and added in the next breath that encroach ing socialism would be more favorable than its opposite to the ever-revolutionary Latin temperament. He fore saw decisive conflict in Asia and Africa to settle "whether the Germanic or the Latin genius will affix its seal upon the world," and opined that these two great races would continue to alternate in shaping the history of the world as they had done in the past. These reassurances that Guizot or Victor Hugo would have subscribed to eighty years earlier show that the 7 Sur la Prétendue décadence des races latines. march of mind on certain questions resembles operatic marches: much tramping and no advance. The reason in this instance is clear. Tarde was really making a politi cal speech at a moment of national crisis, a speech in tended to counteract the flood of reactionary alarms and to allay national fears by boosting, as Renan had done thirty years before, the French alliance with the "Russian colossus." Tarde's rival for influence on the pre-War generation was Gustave LeBon, whose Lois Psychologiques de l'Evolution des peuples (1894) was in its fourteenth edi tion in 1919. To LeBon race is the substratum of history, and success is the Darwinian measure of racial superior ity. He admires the Anglo-Saxon, whose "strength of character enables a bare 60,000 of them to keep under the yoke 250 million Hindus, many of whom are at least their equals intellectually, and some of whom surpass them immensely in artistic taste and depth of philosophi cal insight" (p. 59). LeBon, who had started as a crani- ologist, was convinced that Latin blood was decadent; but that the mixture of races and the part played in modern democracies by the crowd had more to do with the course of national history than pure race. Yet when the War came, his earlier reservations fell away from him and he spoke with all the authority of age and learning on the "ethnic hatreds" and the "too many mental differences that keep certain races from under standing each other. Man belongs first of all to a race, and the barbarian cannot get rid of his mentality." ( First Conseq. of the War, pp. 2, 5, 11, 15.) These statements represented no very great change of mind to one who had been used to describing the evolu tion of peoples as if nations were solid geological strata. It cannot be too often repeated that it is the forvi of race-thinking and not the contents of a given theory that is the object of the present critique. Before seeing in the copious War literature the most varied contents poured into a single mold, one more tendency of the early 1900's must be briefly recapitulated, for it spurred on or ration alized the particular alignment of nations that fought the actual War of 1914. The allusion is to the Anglo-French entente and the preceding wave of anglomania. The feeling of inferiority of the "Latins" between 1870 and 1914 was so acute that by 1900 the question was no longer whether they were inferior to the Anglo- Saxons, but njohy they were inferior. The writings of Edmond Demolins and of the group that rallied around the Science Sociale movement broadcast the dogma of inferiority and utilized it in behalf of economic and political liberalism through education à l'anglaise. This propaganda paraded as usual under the banner of a new science, Demolins unhesitatingly calling his conclusions "social chemistry." His contention was that since 1789 France had been ruined by an ever-increasing state paternalism. No independence, initiative, or freedom of action was possible under the French school and govern mental systems. Together they had made the race timid, sheeplike, indolent, and the Anglo-Saxon had won the world away from her. Demolins's criterion of greatness was colonial power and his panacea, the establishment of boys' schools with compulsory cricket and rugby. 8 In reality his criticisms are the faithful echo of a very widespread dissatisfaction of the French with their gov ernment and their school system. Matthew Arnold might admire the latter and preach it to the English as a model to follow, but to a part of the French élite it seemed antiquated, narrow, impractical, and destructive of im agination. With the disaffection felt by half of France towards the Third Republic Demolins and his group had a natural affinity. Their propaganda under guise of social science, with tables, footnotes, and historical parallels of doubtful accuracy, were very convincing to readers already in agreement with the conclusions. Demolins's use of race enters in with his division of all peoples into communal-minded and individual-minded. At times he "explains" that difference by climate and geography in the classic manner; elsewhere it is simply Celtic; in still other places, the governmental structure is to blame. With regard to France, Demolins is a malcontent who is not quite sure where the shoe pinches, who would like to try going barefoot, but is not even certain that an amputation of the legs is not the real solution. But about the Anglo-Saxon, Demolins, who has seen him under happy circumstances in England, is quite sure. The 8 The famous Ecole des Roches was founded by Demolins to put his theory into practice. Anglo-Saxon is the Englishman of the middle and upper classes, the colonials, and also, apparently, all the citizens of the United States, excepting the Irish, who are com munal Celts. Demolins perceives the rugged individual ism of this "type" without seeing its ragged counterpart. No slums, no misery, no economic struggle come into Demolins' picture. Only the successful Anglo-Saxon "Struggle-for-lifers" whom the Latins must acknowledge as masters can serve as pattern for the modern man. That paragon is a familiar figure in the pages of Kipling. He possesses the advantage of a public-school education, a sojourn in India, county connections, a turn for machin ery, and an ideal domestic life. Obviously, Demolins' romancing about the Anglo-Saxon is dictated wholly by his critique of France. Germany he dismisses with the remark that the Prussians are a half-oriental people and that socialism and militarism will take care of the Ger man menace by undermining the nation. France need not fear the other side of the Rhine, it is the other side of the Channel that spells decadence to the French race, unless the latter copy their masters. How the "Latins" came to ally themselves with the "Anglo-Saxons" against the "Teutons" is a subject that touches racialism at only one point, namely, where Latin decadence ceased to exist by the magic of military un derstandings with England, Russia and Italy. Anglo mania of the Science Sociale type was ready to clasp as brothers the superior race on whom the Latins should model themselves and the union was made easier by the loss of some English prestige in the Boer war. Sergi, Ferrerò, and, more sanely, Colajanni reveal the relation of Italy to this racial and national maneuvering. Simi larly, the divisions in each nation between the superior Aryan and the revolutionary brachycephalic could be healed over by an appeal to Gallo-Roman unity against the irreducible barbaric race— La Nation contre la Race, as Suarès put it in 1916. The English were again taken aboard as Celts, and race-convictions survived unscathed the mental chaos of the four years 1914-1918. Ill Fling down thy gauntlet to the Huns And roar the challenge from thy guns. —henry Timrod, Ode to Carolina, 1862 For all we have and are, For all our children's fate, Stand up and meet the war, The Hun is at the gate! —Kipling, 1914 FOR people who had been measuring skulls and scan ning features as a means of discovering the alien race, the War of Nations must have been an especially severe blow. Race and Nation had never been wholly comfort able in each other's company, mainly because internal politics split nations in half while race united people liv ing under different flags. The Sacred Union, therefore, which was invoked to bind together in every warring nation the socialists, the Jews, the round-skulls, and the other "inferior" types, and to divide races along national frontiers, called for a revaluation of all the race-values. But the shock of mobilization, despite all the previous talk of war, was so great that the rearrangement of race- ideas was amazingly swift and smooth. Only as regards England and Germany did the reversal of commonplace beliefs bring pause to some. H. W. Nevinson writing from Berlin in August, 1914, wistfully described the regiments going to the Front: "Finely-built and well- trained fellows they are, of a stock so much like our own at its best." ( Daily News, Aug. 10, 1914.) Russia rather than Germany was seen as the destroyer of civilization and the pan-Saxon, anti-Slav idea of Rhodes and Kipling died hard. No such feeling existed between Germany and Russia or Germany and France. The course of racial propa ganda in each of these countries precluded even cultural amity and the intellectuals on all sides lost no time before insulting each other over the frontiers. In the Tsar's empire, five decades of internal strife on the question of Westernization had ingrained the notion of an inviolable "Russian soul" which no other people could compre hend or combine with. The novels of Tolstoy and Dos- toevsky reinforced the idea and the great drive towards pan-Slavism inflamed the Russians and the Balkan nations to racial hatred of both the Germans and the subject nationalities within Russia. In Germany, the belief in Russian barbarism was as strong as was in France the belief in German barbarism. To the French, the Germans were an oriental people- Mongols, said Suarès, 9 adding, "Bismarck and Li Hung Chang are a pair of old twins." (La Nation contre la Race, 1916,1, 105.) Against France, Germany had ready to hand all the anti-French, anti-Celtic, anti-Latin writ ings of Chamberlain, Bötticher, Gobineau, Wagner, and others. These matched the accusation of German barbar ism with the counter-accusation of French frivolity, sensuality, and decadence. Germany gloried in barbarism as strength and youthful vigor, and felt superiority in possessing science and discipline, which the French attacked as materialism and lack of imagination. For trained publicists it was not difficult to make virtues and vices change with each new situation. When Italy threw in her lot with the Allies, there was an abrupt cessation of the boasts that Northern Italy was Germanic since the time of the Lombards, and the French pressed to their bosom another Latin sister. The war of words accompanied every phase of the physical death-struggle —Magyars, Rumanians, Serbs, Kurds, Turks—all nation alities and would-be nationalities used race-slogans to maintain anger at fever heat. A complete survey would be as laborious as it would be useless, since war-time racialism, which is only an intensification of the normal 9 The pseudonym of Yves Scantrel, a cultured and sensitive critic whose works command to this day the admiration of a choice following. thing, can be easily reconstructed from a few character istic fragments. In general, England and France converged, in order to condemn the German race, upon one mode of thought, at least to the extent that their own diversity of alleged races would let them. The pattern of non- combatant behavior during nationalistic wars, first stand ardized in France in 1870, was now improved upon and extended to all the belligerents. Among high-class pro fessional men of all countries, the "necessary lying" took the form of writing histories about the enemy nation to prove that German art, manners, and morals revealed a brutish and barbaric race. It was repeatedly asserted that the native philosophy congenital to the Germans was the glorification of the ego and the justification of force. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche were accused of promulgating this phi losophy, while Bismarck was indignantly condemned for giving it practical application. This condemnation by France would have had a great deal more weight had the same writers not simultaneously extolled Napoleon, Stendhal, and Barrés—all proponents of the cult of energy and sacred egoism—and if they had not shown gratitude to Richelieu and Sully for their policy of "ruin ing Germany." Naïve is no word for the discovery that Frederick the Great was a liar and a scoundrel, and dis ingenuous rises to the lips when it is assumed that gov ernment and conquest has been a courteous parlor game until the German race took a hand in it, centuries after the glorious Gallo-Roman tradition which includes Machiavelli, Caesar, and Talleyrand. English historians should have known better, but they did not refrain from chorusing the same opinions compounded of race-fictions and national hatred. With few exceptions, the publicists and readers who had accepted Cecil Rhodes's mystic im perialism that was "of Race and not of Empire" and who had approved the grant of fifteen Rhodes scholarships to Germany "for the peace of the world," now accepted with complacent indignation the oft-repeated historical "fact" that "the Germans are still what they were fifteen centuries ago, the barbarians who raided our ancestors, and destroyed the civilization of the Roman Empire." (A. H. Sayce, London Times, Dec. 22, 1914.) Our an cestors had suddenly changed from the Saxon raiders of Kemble, Green, and Stubbs to their formerly despised victims. In treating of art, the same blindness served the same purpose. People worried whether "Leibniz, Goethe and other German geniuses were more human than German or more German than human. It is from this point of view that it is not a matter of indifference to find out what race Beethoven belongs to." (Maurras, Uart Fran çais et les barbares, p. 85.) Such absurdities can be laid to the account of war-time folly but it must not be for gotten that they seemed real and satisfactory to the emotion of hate because however shifting or contradic tory they were not new ideas. Repetition diminishes strangeness and what we recognize we accept without question because it is already a part of ourselves. By being drilled into thinking for nearly a hundred years that the Germans were a barbaric race, the French came to see nothing but their own racial abstractions, which were eagerly borrowed by the English to replace their no longer tenable brand of the same superstition. At the same time the unreality of the abstractions caused many to feel surprise when the events they had always pre dicted came to pass: "On croyait se connaître!'''' cried René Lote querulously. Understanding was not promoted then or for the future by the torrent of publications that issued from French, German, and English presses on the race and Kultur of the enemy. The popularity of these obscur antist compilations is perhaps one of the worst results of war-hysteria, for it inevitably lowers the standard of intellectual honesty by substituting for it a standard of political utility that is irrelevant and inimical to culture. Still, it would be wrong to suppose that hatred was the only motive behind so much bad writing. Many were those who wished to ennoble the conflict and make it something more than the traditional quarrel between France and Germany. For those, the Allies represented the civilized West and Central Europe the amorphous East. As Easterners, the Germans were Mongols; when the Bulgarians joined the Central Powers, they became Mongols, too, and the Yellow Peril became explicitly identical with the German peril and the socialist peril. The author of these suggestions, Andre Suarès, was by no means an isolated voice or an illiterate man. His views were echoed, or paralleled by such notables as Claude Farrère, Bergson, Babelon, Massis, Bain ville, Allier, Louis Bertrand, Barre, Barrés, Bordeaux, Broermann, Dimier, Jean Finot, 10 Gaston Gaillard, C. Jullian, LeBon, Lange, Lavisse, Mauclair, Muret, Mithouard, F. Masson, Picot, Julien Rovère, Seillière, Schuré, and Spiess. The list, in complete as it is, suggests the diversity of tendencies united behind the broad range of anti-Germanism during the War. What emerges pathetically from the articles, pam phlets, and books of these writers is the yearning for some kind of idealism to cover the reality of the strug gle. That is what Suarès is seeking for when he distin guishes the French nation from the German race. "Race is matter, nation is spirit." (La Nation contre la Race, I, p. 15.) This was an idea difficult to popularize in these words. In practice it proved easier simply to identify the Allies with civilization in the usual manner, or to contrast Celtic goodness (despite the Celts' human sacrifices) with the bloody cult of Thor and Wodin. The cruelty of the East was often mentioned, but it had to be qualified in order to allow for the presence of Russia on the side of the Allies. At that point "Celticism shakes hands with the Slavic soul above the oppressive pan-Germanism." (Schuré, Vâme celtique, p. xvi.) Or 10 Author of an earlier book against race-prejudice, and who con tradicts many of his previous assertions in Civilisés contre Allemands, 1915. else East and West are reversed, as in Marc Saunier's Secret Origins of the War, where the conflict turns out to be the struggle between the pacific Hindu (Aryan) civilization and the crude habits of the Celts (Germans). (Revue Hebdomadaire, July 27, 1918, p. 454 n.) For many, including the diplomat Gérard and the anthropol ogist Perrier, the War was the "reawakening of the Latin Races" after a period of eclipse at the hands of German ism ( Revue Hebdomadaire , Nov. 4, 1916, pp. 7; 29-46); while for one casuistical disciple of Gobineau, the War was a conflict between the true Germanism of France and the barbaric Teutonism of Germany. (Spiess, lm~ périalismes, 1917, p. x.) The preoccupation with the national and cultural aspects of race during the War might be thought to have killed all interest in the "science" of race. To a certain extent this is true, though Suarès, Sageret, and others still argued the question of skulls and the color of Goethe's hair. (Suarès, I, p. 101.) It was left once more to French genius to discover under the pressure of emergency a new application of "science" to race- discrimination. This discovery was made by one Dr. Edgar Bérillon. Its novelty may shock at first, but when one finds it recorded in the Bulletin of the Society of Medicine of Paris (June 25, 1915), and expanded in the reports of the French Association for the Advancement of Science (February 4, 1917) incredulity yields to authority. Besides, Dr. Bérillon occupied important medical positions and must have been officially author ized and subsidized to lecture as he did all over France on the subject of his researches. His discovery is that the German race suffers from polychesia (excessive defeca tion) and bromidrosis (body odor). These diseases are the result of intemperance and lead to degenerescence and unnatural crimes. In the present War they serve to detect infallibly the spies of German race masquerading in France as Alsatians. By means of these criteria the doctor was able to discover such a spy in his own service and to bring him to book. The doctor confirmed his views by urinalysis which led to the further discovery that German urine contains 20% non-uric nitrogen as against 15% for other races. Moreover, the large intestine of the German race is about nine feet longer than normal, a test that unfortunately requires an autopsy. But when any of these abnormalities and diseases occur in France, they are generally found to accompany a German cast of countenance. The physician, whose ideas have not been followed up since the War but whose methods are characteristic, combined them with the well-established systems of race-thinking. The War occurred, said he, because the true Germans are blond dolichos whereas the leaders in France, England, and Italy are brachycephalic; "in other words, it is the age-old struggle of the Celts and Ger mans." (Assoc. Fçse Avane. Sci., Feb. 4, 1917, p. 11.) Since Bérillon believes that "race is not an idea of the mind, but an entity," and that among races there is superiority and degenerescence, he suggests the establish- ment of a new science called ethnochemistry, for he is sure that "chemically and physiologically there is more difference between the French and the Germans than between a Senegalese and a Zulu." A blood-count might provide good criteria, since French blood "is superior in point of globular richness." {Ibid., pp. 26, 27.) The date of this theory is not so remote as to warrant a condescending smile, and it is only a matter of time, not of scientific progress, before we reach the official (though temporary) faith in blood-testing displayed by national institutes and eugenic clinics under Hitler's Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Chapter X. RACE IN THE MODERN WORLD I Lastly we have learnt something that 1 shall mention straight out: the ability to hate. Who ever cannot hate is not a Man, and History is made by Men.— S pengler on the Political Duties of German Youth, 1924 THE violent use of race-doctrines in Nazi Germany has obscured and confused more things than appear on the surface. In the first place, as the previous chapters have tried to show, race-thinking is more universal and deep- lying than any one doctrine of race, however noisy its proponents. But there are other misconceptions current about the particular outcropping of race-prejudice in the Third Reich. It is a mistake to think that the German dictators have themselves invented any part of their race-system. It is a mistake to think that they forced it upon an educated élite to whom the notion of race was new and repellent. Finally, it is a mistake to think that Nazi Germany has adopted a single and consistent race- creed. At least three divergent race-beliefs, all of them built on ideas antedating the advent of the Nazis to power, are embodied in the vast literature on race that modern Germany reads. The first is the anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist prejudice of the nineteenth-century pro- Aryans. It is official and it is practical. It involves the 242 Nordic Myth and a mixture of puritanism with pagan religiosity. The second is a compound of natural science, philology, and historiography. It is also official but not practical (although required for study in the schools 1 ), for it finds six European races present in Germany, dif ficult to differentiate and not connected with special political views. The third race-system is part of the Minister of Agriculture's propaganda to make the peas antry proud of their race. It denies most of the postulates of the Nordic hero-worship and exalts the racial virtues of tenacity and endurance at the expense of the warlike and adventurous qualities. Its chief proponent is Walther Darré and its practical uses are self-evident. Perhaps for that reason it is also official. In the first (Aryan-Nordic) stream of thought, many things are present, which are best summed up in Alfred Rosenberg's Mythus der 20ten Jahrhunderts (1920). A popular idealism, grounded in all the social self-sacrificing virtues, is appealed to for the establishment of a com plete culture-pattern. Every trait or quality that can possibly help Germany as a nation in her precarious post war situation is glorified as the exclusive appanage of the Nordisch-deutscher and accompanied by a great deal of verbose mysticism involving the Soul of the Race, the Unity of Being, and the Racial Ideal of Beauty. The 1 It is required in all schools, regardless of subject. For example, the Mary Wigman School of the Dance in Dresden must examine all candidates for diplomas, whether they are Germans or foreigners, in the Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes. 244 race: a study in modern superstition many origins of these ideas are explicitly recognized by the leaders of the movement. A. Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925), the coiner of the phrase Third Reich and a devotee of Prussian racial superiority, is together with Julius Langbehn, 2 the chief immediate forerunner. The older ones are Gobineau, Nietzsche, Chamberlain, and Paul de Lagarde. The "popular idealism" referred to above does not jibe very well with the ideas of these aristocratic fore runners, but in its literature at least, National-socialism is social, popular, democratic. That is why race is a common ground for national co-operation and intel lectual autarky, as well as an inexhaustible source of pride that everyone can share. Again, the mystical in alienability of race does not agree very well with the clumsy practices of "race-hygiene," but the two are none the less forced to exist side by side. It was propa ganda and not race-instinct that made German women for a time stop smoking and powdering, but according to theory, blood is supposed to express itself as much in moral behavior as in artistic productions. Behind the anti-Marxist side of Aryanism there are of course the scattered hints in Gobineau, so that it is not inappropriate to find these expanded in a life of him by Franz Hahne dated 1924. Hahne calls for a high-minded Führer who, "raising himself above the Marxist Party 2 Author of Rembrandt as Educator (1913), a cultural and racial critique of pre-War socialism modeled after Nietzsche's Schopen hauer as Educator. clichés, will know how to create an order without harm to the economic needs and necessities of the times and who will satisfy the majority." ( Gobineau, Ein Lebens bild, p. 72.) Gobinism and satisfying the majority are strangely mated here but they aptly reveal the clear purpose and confused scholarship of Nazi racialism. To complete the picture, Hahne is also concerned with the pre-eminence of the tall blonds, but he does not say how it shall be secured. That is the task of the hygienists. Eugenics as a social science is also not a new idea. It goes back to the theorizing of Ammon, Muffang, and Vacher de Lapouge who in the nineties had talked know ingly of social selection. Alfred Ploetz invented the term Race-Hygiene and since then many German writers have attempted to give it practical meaning. Ranging all the way from public health and baby-prizes to the ster ilization or extermination of one's opponents, the word covers a multitude of ideas, most of them as yet unprac- ticable on a large scale even with government support. The literal notion of "blood-testing" to determine race, which seemed at one time to be acted on by the many race-hygiene museums and institutes for biological re search in Germany has been definitely repudiated by Professor Leffler of the Racial-Political Bureau. The question usually arose out of the "problem" of blood transfusions between "Aryans" and "Semites." Before the official pronouncement, "Semitic" doctors were re ported as having been penalized, or sent to concentration camps for using their own blood to save an "Aryan" patient. The theory of such punishments rests on a men tal confusion due, in the words of Dr. Leffier, "to the figurative use of the word 'blood' in the sense of hered ity." (N. Y. Times, Oct. 20, 1935.) The second great theory officially current in the Third Reich is a descriptive account of the various races that form the German people. Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, Pro fessor of Social Anthropology at Jena, has a virtual monopoly of the books presenting these facts and he does not abuse the privilege that monopoly confers. One can buy, according to one's purse, a large Günther in two volumes, several smaller ones in a single volume, an abstract in fifty pages, and even an outline of sixteen pages for a few pfennigs. Günther's six races are the Nordic, Westic, Ostie (Alpine), Dinarian, East-Baltic, and Falic. They are sharply distinguished by the com parison of fifteen characteristics ranging from stature to carriage, which may be quiet, stiff, lively, or controlled. The Jews are described as "not belonging to the German people" but they are held to be not so much a race as a people composed of several races. However, "a certain something, difficult to describe, is common to almost all Jews." ( Kurzer Abriss, pp. 5-6.) After this tolerant ac count, which would prove once more, if there were need, that race-prejudice is an excuse for political animus and that two official race-doctrines can live peaceably together despite flagrant contradictions, the author gives a full historical, psychological, and cultural explication of each of his six races, and concludes that the German people has particularly cherished and manifested the Nordic blood-heritage, and at no time more so than in the New Germany. The Minister of Agriculture, Walther Darre, is, de spite his French name, an ardent Nordicist. He sees Nordics wherever he finds the admirable qualities of the husbandman; for instance, if Plutarch may be trusted, Cato is a Nordic. Although Darre makes no pretense at writing scientific works, he takes violent issue with Dr. Kynast and the other modern Germans who think that only warlike noblemen can be Nordic heroes. On the contrary the peasantry is the key to the understanding of the Nordic race. He argues: to be a peasant is to be free, to understand Handiwork, to be effective in it and "thereby to possess a feeling for the organic interplay of forces in Work as a Whole." ( Bauerntum als Lebens quell der Nord. Rasse (1928), 3rd ed., 1933, p. 279-) The historic criterion of race, as between Nordics and Semites, is the Pig—a sacred domestic animal for the former and shunned by the latter, for it represents the antithesis of nomadic desert life (p. 239). Darre at one time joined hands with the eugenists and advocated polygamy for the sake of producing from selected Nordic German women the best possible breed. Such a policy seems difficult to carry out in a still indi vidualistic world, and in a country where the thinkers on these issues are as disunited as elsewhere; where Nietzsche who wanted Jewish-Prussian Supermen, and Chamberlain who believes the physiological basis of race negligible, are equally revered; where Max Wieser calls Günther's researches "card-index pedantry" and where L. F. Clauss with thoroughgoing mysticism prefers the blue-eyed Berbers of North Africa where he spent some years, to all the degenerating races of Europe. The three official and contradictory doctrines and their offshoots have given full play to individual fancy within the general framework of race-thinking. Many, indeed most, of the books on the recommended lists and shelves antedate 1933 and are therefore full of un orthodox views, and the staggering catalogue of the Munich publishing firm of J. F. Lehmann, which has taken the lead in books on race since the War, supports the same conclusion. Brown- and black-shirts as well as private persons entertain the most divergent views, notably on the Semitic question, where it is not uncom mon to find a racial distinction being made in favor of the German and against the Baltic Jews. The great majority of the books and articles dealing with race concern themselves with its cultural manifesta tions. "Race in the Liberal Arts," 3 "Art and Race," 4 "Speech and People," 5 "Race and Soul," 6 "Race and Spirit," 7 "Nordic Thinking" 8 —these show the kind of titles one comes to expect. The erudition and insight dis- 3 By L. Schemann, 1928. 4 By P. Schultze-Naumburg, 1928. 5 By Fritz Stroh, 1932. 6 Two books by that title: one by L. F. Clauss, 1926; the other by Max Wieser, 1933. 7 and 8 By Franz Weidenreich, 1932. played in these works side by side with ill-digested sci ence or direct prejudice makes their perusal doubly dis tressing. Their insistence on certain topics, however, gives away the mainspring of their inspiration: philos ophy, natural science, and music are fields in which Germany has produced such outstanding geniuses that racial interpretations of the whole culture reduce it to these three branches in order to prove superiority. Lud wig Woltmann, a pre-War racialist who edited the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue and wrote The Ger mans in Italy, The Germans in France , had already be fore his death blazed the path with his studies of musical heredity. 9 After the War, Richard Eichenauer began anew and in his Musik und Rasse (1932) furnished a racial interpretation of the great composers' work. The "Western soul" appears as "form" in the greatest musical masterpieces and is conspicuously absent from the works of "Semitic souls" like Mendelssohn and Mahler. Bizet gives trouble, for Carmen is "a high point in Western music" and Eichenauer has ascertained that the com poser had blue eyes and blond hair, yet finds he may have had a Jewish mother. Rossini is another bad case. He is clearly not "Western" (i.e., Nordic) but in the Barber of Seville "one believes that one finds traces of the avestisch racial spirit, though rather as a result of the subject" (pp. 254-5 an ^ n -)- 9 He found that among 4,067 musicians only 20% had unusual parents or forebears, and on these he based his conclusions about racial transmission. The other 3,270 are "isolated cases." The monthly magazine Die Musik is given over to similarly profound discoveries. Articles entitled: Richard Wagner as Announcer of the Arian World, 10 Home- feeling and Foreignness in Music, 11 Richard Wagner and Germanism 12 contain a perpetual, hypnotizing reitera tion of the words blood, race, spirit, music, echt-deutsch (genuinely German) blood, race, spirit, German, Nordic, Aryan. Aside from this identity in the refrain there is nothing but inconsistency in the sentiments about music and musicians, a state of things paralleled in other peri odicals dealing with the other arts, history, philosophy, the physical sciences, and mathematics. Now if the political speeches of Germany's leaders are searched for a race-doctrine, which of the three official theories and the several cultural racialisms emerges as dominant? The question is natural but it can no more be answered than the question, "Where is the socialism in National-Socialism?" Both questions would imply that the leaders big and little are of one mind and that the race-thinking and the socialism are discussed as ends in themselves. The facts prove the exact opposite: race is ever purely a means to rally scattered forces behind something simple and obvious. Race in Germany was a means to give back to the German people a feeling of self-respect after the national humiliation at Versailles 10 By Fr. Baser. 11 By Brockt: Schönberg, Hindemith, Weill (all moderns) are foreigners. 12 By Fr. Panzer. and since. Inevitably, giving self-respect meant giving overweening superiority as well as the opportunity for live persecution and for concealing political vendettas. To state these facts is not to condone or excuse them: indeed it is impossible to understand the vice of thought inherent in race unless its function as ill-fitting cloak to more real passions is made clear. What emerges therefore from the speeches of Hitler and Goebbels is that race, culture, and political action have been welded together with words and forged into a lever for national uplift. After 1870 the French called it redressement and praised the intellectuals who gave them biased lectures or his tories to raise their depressed spirits. The case was less acute but identical, if the relative magnitudes of the two wars are kept in mind. The compound of race, culture, and political purpose is likewise perfectly natural. Hitler says: "At all times, social philosophies have conditioned not only the trend of politics, but also the aspect of cul tural life." ( On Culture , Party-Day, 1933.) This in sistence on culture is nothing but a roundabout justifica tion of power. The "race" is great because it produces certain kinds of thoughts, machines, or art-forms and these warrant, nay, demand, the use of force to make the world notice and adopt them. Such was the old pre- War Kultur, even the Kulturkampj of Bismarck and cer tainly the Anglo-Saxonism of Cecil Rhodes, the White Man's Burden of Kipling, the French mission civilisatrice, and all other Manifest Destinies. In Germany it carries the added burden of an internal dictatorship and an eco- nomic crisis that made anti-Semitism as "useful" as it was in France in the Dreyfus Affair. For all purposes, the chief value of race-worship is its stimulation of group-conceit by paralyzing the critical faculties. Previ ous examples have been commented on, but perhaps the choicest one by which to remember Nazi racialism is to be found in Czech-Jochberg's popular History Seen Na tional-Socialistic all y (1933). It consists in a caption printed beneath the head of the Venus of Melos, opposite page 16, which reads "A typical Nordic Woman's Head." 13 II The superior race must reject the inferior or mixing with it, or even living alongside of it, degenerate itself karl pearson on National Life from the Standpoint of Science. FAR from diminishing the amount of race-thinking and race-antagonism in other parts of the world, the German use of race has only encouraged the same habit else where. Loud indignation at physical persecution and the shaking of fists at Gobineau by the more learned critics has accomplished little. Refutations of the German brand of racialism have almost always consisted in a denial that 13 The cream of the jest lies in the fact that the Venus dates from the Hellenistic period when Greek art was probably "Semitized" by an influx of artists from Asia Minor. the Nordic race was superior or that the Aryan was the only pure race. The idea of race itself was not called into question by the opponents or the victims of the persecutions. On the contrary, racial pride was stiffened by the onslaught, at the same time as other factors played into the hands of racialists everywhere. The same reasons that made Germany believe more and more in the mysticism of race before, during, and after the War in steady crescendo, made other nations follow a similar course. The "idealism" of the War had emphasized for both sides the inhumanity, the alien-ness, the racial dif ference of the other side. After the War the habits en gendered by war led to a cult of energy and struggle which stressed group conflict as useful. Asserting the utility of war was also a way of reassuring oneself that the four years of bloodshed were a good investment. In this pathetic situation Mussolini and Hitler can be said to find another psychological explanation. The connec tion with racialism is equally apparent. Race-thinking and race-prejudice strengthen the warlike attitude of groups. Sir Arthur Keith said as much in his Boyle lec ture at Oxford in 1919. The War was barely over and the university undergraduates might reasonably have ex pected more peaceful counsels from the dean of British anthropologists, Hunterian Professor at the Royal Col lege of Surgeons, and internationally-known scientific philosopher. But only the familiar passions and prejudices enlivened his discourse. Referring to the foundation of the lectureship, he expresses amused contempt that for Robert Boyle and his contemporaries there were no race- problems. He then enjoys an historical merry-go-round to show that race-antipathy has proved "experimentally successful" as a method of government in "Saxon Amer ica." He talks familiarly of "British or Nordic stock," the "North-Sea breed," the "usual Saxon sense of race- discrimination." With no great prophetic insight he says that the chief racial problem on the Continent is that of the Jews; but he none the less discovers in modern Eng land "pure types" of Celt, Iberian, Saxon, and so forth. Gobineau addressing an Oxonian audience might have been wittier or more vehement, he could not have out done Sir Arthur in extravagant applications of the race- principle. Nor was this lecture destined to be an irre sponsible spree into an unfamiliar realm. Sir Arthur proved himself a second and even third offender, with his address on the Place of Prejudice in Modern Civiliza tion ( 1931 ) —this time the students of Aberdeen were being treated to rectorial wisdom—and in his book Ethnos, or the Problem of Race, in both of which war is advocated as best for the evolution of the race, of the "great race," in the best style of Bernhardi, Keyserling, or Benito Mussolini. The earlier of Keith's sermons coincided with the activities of the second Ku Klux Klan in the United States, which proclaimed anew that the "Nordic Prot estants" are the noblest and fittest race alive and that pure blood and race are the guarantees of a great civiliza tion. "The Klan," said Imperial Wizard Evans, . . does believe in white supremacy. It believes that never in the history of the world has a mongrel civilization endured." (Lit. Dig., Feb. 5, 1921.) The Klan was anti- Japanese in the northwest, anti-Negro in the South, and against foreigners, radicals, and Catholics everywhere else. This combination of antagonisms is not new, nor is the hypocrisy of the race-doctrine, but its resurgence after the War is characteristic of an era of suspicion, in security, and explosive touchiness thinly veneered with heroics and talk of self-sacrifice. The Peace Conference, with its colossal problem of exacting a victory and appeasing hungry nationalities, still further vulgarized the concept of race. Every self- determinant population had a race-problem—had two or three race-problems—to be settled by gerrymandering and compromise. The right to self-determination was itself often grounded on the fact of being a "separate race" in the manner of the Albanians already cited. The conflicts of race and nationality were therefore conflicts of terminology fed by territorial greed, and not, as is often thought, the natural conflict of two non-congruent entities. The special position of Germany as the chief defeated nation together with the historical importance of Prussia in the Germanies, accounts for the strength and apparent unity of racialism there in the post-War period. The pre-Hitler growth of race-thinking may have been stim ulated by the influx of Polish and Russian Jews after 1918, but that local factor is trivial when compared with those having historical and psychological roots. The real diversity of race-doctrines is the best proof of it, as is also the mounting-tide of race-propaganda in Sweden, Finland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Italy, France, England, the Baltic countries, Turkey, Persia, Mexico, and the United States. The truth of the matter is that in the modern world, real or supposed feuds apparently cannot be carried on in their own terms. Since race happens to be the most popular form of gloss for simple hatred, a few more examples may not be amiss. In England, Sir Oswald Mosley's anti-Semitism is a trivial and imitative symptom of racialism, but the con troversy between militarists like Major Yeats-Brown and pacifists like Beverley Nichols and Sir Norman Angeli brings up the bogey of race at every turn, the connect ing link being the fear that if we forget race we shall perish culturally and nationally; we shall perhaps "save our skins but lose our souls. That is the price we have to pay for a deracialized world." But there is little danger of that so long as respected writers like A. H. Sayce continue in an apparently impartial way to "teach" race in connection with other subjects. Bringing out a new edition of his Races of the Old Testament in 1925, he says: "Thirty-four years have passed since the first edi tion of my book was published but I find little to alter in it. Perhaps this means that ethnological science has not advanced so rapidly as some of the other historical sci- enees; but it may be that the main facts had been already acquired once for all." ( Pref ., June, 1925.) He continues to deal in orbital indexes, prognathism, pigmentation, higher and lower races, and their mental qualities: "Prominent jaws imply the development of physical strength and appetite at the expense of the in tellectual faculties" (p. 30). Nine years later, in his opening address as Chairman of the International Con gress of Anthropology and Ethnology, Sir Grafton Elliott-Smith, while fingering a skull found near the Thames, said: . . at the present time it is of the great est importance that anthropologists should reach some consensus of opinion on such problems as may be used to justify or excuse political action. If our discussions do nothing more, it will be a definite gain if we can impress upon politicians some respect for anthropological truth and the generally admitted knowledge of the facts of race and culture." The London Times, in commenting on the assertion, nearly simultaneous with the Congress, of Sir John Simon's Aryan purity, made an ironic and gloomy fore cast: ". . . race is merely one of many equally valid ways of establishing affinity. . . . The instinct for sep aratism is too deep-seated ever to be at a loss for a means of expressing itself. In the expanding scale, when fron tiers have fallen out of fashion, it can fasten on still un tried combinations of race, language, or creed; in the diminishing—and then the cycle of history will have made a full turn—it can rediscover the indisputable affini- ties of clans, totems and matriarchal descent." (Sept. 1, 1934O In a nearby column Professor Flinders Petrie was car rying on the old cultural-scientific fight against anti- Semitism, by using archaeology and likening Jews and Englishmen as "mixed races" against which "pure races" have little chance. But pointing out the advantages of "mixed ancestry" leaves the race-problem just where it is for the next system-maker to utilize. So Lothrop Stoddard, who cried wolf when the Yel low Peril was fashionable, publishes in the United States a revised version of his program of racial fears, admitting his former error and committing it again with improved details. It would be unjust to say that he is out of touch with the times, when one could read of a Southern Gov ernor's electioneering appeal to his constituents' race- prejudice and discover in the Republican Presidential platform a guarded reference to the perilous subject. The Harlem riots, the growth of overt anti-Semitism, the printed attacks on the Roosevelt administration as the "Ju-deal," the continued hardships imposed by the Im migration Law upon individuals of certain races, the in creasing reliance on race-explanations in cultural matters —all these signs justify the belief that diversified race- thinking has a promising future in the United States, and that the creation of a "new race" out of the melting pot, which Woodrow Wilson and others foresaw in 1917, has either failed to take place or failed to produce that unity of mind which our best experts on race tell us is one of its infallible tests. In France, the various streams of race-thinking are pursued as never before. The post-War boom in Gobin- ism has been described elsewhere. In addition, the na tionalist cult of the "French race" has all the added weight of the worship of the dead to reinforce it. No longer is the old quarrel of German versus Gaul tenable as an explanation of internal politics. Two wars against the Germans in half a century have made that impossible, but the position formulated by Maurice Barrés in his Integral Nationalism stands as the bulwark of conserva tism against all internationalist opinion. The fervor and completeness of its expression have given it a permanent hold on half the intelligent youth of France, all the more so because, like many nationalists, Barrés began his intel lectual and political career as a kind of socialist. In his early work race remains largely undefined, but it ac counts for many things—notably for Bakunin's anar chism, due to the Slavs' being a backward race. From this conventional practice, Barrés soon proceeded to manufacture a violent system of prejudice intertwined with his politico-philosophical creed and his artistic sense. In novels and travel books, which have something of Stendhal's passion for crime, danger, and vivid color, Barrés proclaims himself a "passionate Mediterranean." His cult of the Ego is nothing but the fierce sensitive in dividualism of Gobineau or Nietzsche with Soil- and Ancestor-worship superimposed upon it. Politics and the War confirmed him in a kind of mystical collectivism with the deification of the "soil and its dead" as a spirit ual refuge. "One hopes for nothing save from that inner music transmitted with their blood by the dead of our race." The strength and obscurity of this mysticism surpass anything that the Germans or Anglo-Saxons have conceived upon the common sentiment of patriotism. The War and post-War periods—Barrés died in 1926 —only added to his disciples. Echoes of his thought re sound everywhere: "The energy of France is the re sources of the race." (Bainville.) The planting of a tree symbolic of the Latin race of Monterey but in soil taken from France and to be watered with water from Paris, is recorded in moderate newspapers as "an idea not without grandeur." Scientists, historians, artists, and mis cellaneous writers continue to proclaim their faith in the soil, the eternal life of the nation, and the sacredness of the occidental heritage, with a kind of arrogant shrill ness indicative of acute nationalistic fear. An academician soberly describes the fatherland as "an association on the same soil of the living with the dead and those to be born . . : we are ourselves only when we are pene trated, saturated by the traditions of our race." (Bor deaux.) How far the "soil" extends and how it is the same are questions these mystics do not answer. We have no inkling either who our sacred dead ancestors are—do they include, for the French Catholics, the dead leaders of the French Revolution? Do they include, for the Bretons, the Southern "blues" who came under Hoche to shoot them down? But although the fundamentals of the creed are, like most articles of faith, diplomatically vague, the results are practical and tangible. First and foremost, a policy of France to the French; second, a hatred and suspicion of aliens and lastly a preference for some special corner of France where the "race" is, so to speak, more racial than national. Hence, an ad herence to the movement of decentralization known in France as regionalism, analogous to the American States' Rights. Particularly strong in Lorraine, this type of racial nationalism has been created in large measure by the French statesmen and writers from that region. Barrés himself points out how the "exasperation of this race face to face with the Germanic race" has produced the ener getic nationalists of his time and ours—Funck-Brentano (a Luxemburger), Louis Madelin, Emile Hinzelin, Ernest Babelon, Georges Ducrocq. He might have com pleted the list by adding Poincaré. These men, aided by circumstance, have created a movement transcending their special pleading and their local or temporary in fluence. With the example of the new Germany before them, the younger French patriots fed on the writings of Barrés and other racialists of his stamp have tended to show a tolerant sympathy, almost a sentimental regard, for the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus period. Writing about Drumont, the author of Jewish France, in 1934, a well-known columnist deplored the fact that Drumont's articles have not been collected. He almost idolizes the anti-Semite and refers to his work as "bearing witness to a past which is not so past as all that." (Jules Veran in Comœdia, April, 1934.) A periodical like Atlantis not only devotes space to race-theories of the most diverse and fantastic make-up but claims Aryan race-supremacy for France with the slogan Ex Occidente Lux. (Seventh Year, No. 49, Sept.-Oct., 1933.) Two years ago, the Stavisky scandal generated a slight but unmistakable wave of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Another flock of articles appeared on Gobineau. Two plays, one German and one French, dealt with the race- problem, and newspapers, both in Paris and in the im portant provincial centers, gave space to articles, reports of lectures, and even Presidential messages on France's Latin, Roman, Gallic, "hyperborean" or racially unique civilization. 14 While the frankly fascist Francistes adopted the Germanic double-edged axe or francisque as their symbol, the more numerous youths of the Croix de Feu who participated in the February riots made no secret of their politico-racial antipathies, despite their leaders' caution to avoid appearances of Hitlerite think- 14 In the course of many conversations in France with a great variety of persons—from university and professional men to civil servants, business and working men-the writer has found race- beliefs to be quasi-universal. In most cases, the subject of race was not even brought up by the writer, but was spontaneously offered as an explanation, a reason, a justification of unrelated matter, by an interlocutor entirely ignorant of the writer's curiosity on that point. ing. For them just the same, French Communism, Mos cow, and Germany form one "oriental" peril, while the "Anglo-Saxon" policy of the Balance of Power in Europe is a racial trait which the "Latins" must be on guard against. Between 1934 and 1936, when Léon Blum's Premiership brought forth a fresh batch of the old po litico-racial arguments, these feelings have no doubt fluc tuated, but there is not the point. The point is that when passions flare up over some event of internal or foreign politics, which in our era is becoming a daily occurrence, the framework of race-thinking in France is ready, tried, and trusted to give the passions form and direction. The nature and motives of race-thinking are as constant and tireless as the tides of the Ocean. Ill Every biologist knows that intelligence is in herited, energy is inherited, insanity is in herited, emotional possibilities are inherited, a maris inner character is inherited— a . e. wig- gam in The New Decalogue of Science ALTHOUGH race-thinking is not new in nature or purpose, the "facts" it exploits are renewed from time to time. Tacitus and Boulainvilliers, Montesquieu and Bishop Stubbs were content with historical research and climate theories. Then came the "biological revolu tion" and race-thinkers pinned their hopes on anatomy, while philologists made race subsist on linguistic roots. The modern period has not been without adding its con tribution, in keeping with its interests and abilities. Liv ing in the present, we need only refer to social (includ ing criminal) statistics, to experiments in genetics and medicine, and to the renaissance of descriptive anthro pology. These last two sciences will receive ampler treat ment in the next chapter. Here a few words are in order on statistics in general and biologico-physical science in particular. The growing use of so-called intelligence tests gave rise, especially in the United States, to statistical studies for determining the relative capacities of selected groups. Nathaniel D. Hirsch in his study of Natio-Racial Mental Differences (1926) reports on several of these statistical ventures which tend to show that nationali ties of superior intelligence are "largely Nordic" (pp. 240-2). Mr. Hirsch himself conducted tests to disprove these results and, finding that the tests showed "no con nection between intelligence and the possession of Nor dic blood" concluded that "differences in intelligence are National or Natio-racial, not Racial" (pp. 308-9). In spite of this fine-drawn distinction, the author con tinues to speak of "the Natio-racial Frenchman," "the formation of the Natio-race in Germany" and the "bi ological blend of . . . three races" and gives exact in dications of mental and other capacities, just like the other intelligence-testers whose work he doubted earlier. The tests and statistics have been shuffled around merely for the sake of calling into question the superior intelli gence of the Nordic race. The existence of that race Mr. Hirsch takes for granted. He only wishes us to know that the best whisky is not a "straight" but a blend. Besides the work in genetics done all over the world since the War and which leads the most authorized ob servers to feel that heredity involves a far more com plex set of relations than the popular glibness about genes and chromosomes takes into account, biological re search on race-problems has followed two avenues. The first is the correlation of race and disease. The "inci dence" of cancer, arthritis, asthma, and other widespread ailments among various groups has been studied in the hope of discovering a particular racial susceptibility to one or other of them. It has long been a popular as well as a medical supposition that the Jews were especially subject to nervous disorders. 15 The difficulty with a racial division of diseases, which would naturally im ply some physiological or chemical difference in the structure of the human beings composing the race, is that the medical statistician has to argue in a circle to prove his theory. He takes the Jews or the Eskimos as 15 In nineteenth-century France alone Le Dantec, Charcot, Foville, Boudin, Chervin, and Bérard paid more than passing attention to "race-diseases." Driesmans, on the contrary, was rationalizing current superstitions when he said that the three signs of the German race were ease of infection by contagious disease, depressive nervous ail ments, and a tendency to suicide. ( Die Kelten, III, p. 75.) See also Sofer (1909), Bauer (1924), Beneke (1878), Draper (1930), Keith (1930). a starting point, finds some degree of correlation be tween membership in the group and a certain disease and offers the correlation as a test of common race. The point to be proved—and it has never been done—is that no other factor save that of race causes the susceptibility to—let us say—arthritis. But since arthritis would be, in that event, the only positive test of race so far pro duced, all that could be said would be that arthritics are a race. If the disease chosen were housemaid's knee, no one would for a moment prefer to associate it in- dissolubly with the Irish (Celtic) race, but would ascribe it to occupation. It is equally probable that the differ ences in the incidence of the chief diseases is due to social or environmental factors that are completely con cealed by the initial grouping of Irish, Nordics, or Jews. The second line of modern biological research into race is that of body chemistry. Over a hundred years ago the French physician Chevreul had suggested that each "race" must present chemical differences. It was then (1824) the day of five-race classification according to the color of the skin so that the hypothesis, involving the chemical fact of pigmentation, had some reason be hind it. When skull-shape replaced pigmentation as a test and when the climate theory of the sun-darkened skins of Negroes and Indians was discarded, chemical explanations went by the board. They have returned in the form of many new facts about Diet, with divergent results, some of which lead to the extinction of the race- issue altogether, as we shall see in the next chapter; but all of them depend for their validity on the evolutionary transmission of acquired characteristics, which only brings us back to the problem of genetics underlying the whole question. At the opposite pole from chemical or mechanical solutions of the race-question is that provided by several psychoanalysts. Nothing like a race-system is to be found in the works of Freud himself, except for a suggestion that the growth of certain race-animosities is due to "narcissism in respect of minor differences" 16 but in the minds and writings of several other analysts, notably Dr. Beatrice Hinkle of New York, mental patterns and race are often interchangeable terms. Says Dr. Hinkle: ". . . If the author [the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré] had substituted the introvert type for the 'Latin temperament' then there would be no dif ficulty in his reconciling the French thought with He brew blood and German training, for they all belong to the introvert type of thought, while the Anglo-Saxon belongs to the characteristic extravert type. "It is to introverted Germany that we must go for the highest development of abstract philosophical and idealistic thinking. True to type, in this realm her mas culine principle finds its expression, and when, depart ing from her natural field, she assumes the extraverted mode of aggressive action, she must of necessity pro duce an overdetermined behavior and be doomed to 16 Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, p. 90. failure when matched against an equally strong and naturally extraverted power. It is only forty years ago that one of her greatest statesmen spoke of her scorn fully as a nation of philosophers, poets, and dreamers. It is this natural Germany that corresponds to the simple introvert type as described. If our world had been one in which philosophy, science, and poetry were held in equal regard with trade, commerce, and machinery, Ger many might have continued to use her own functions in the realm for which they are fitted and have found her path to power along lines where her supremacy could hold unchallenged. Then the history of the world would have been differently written." ( The Re-Creating of the Individual, 1923, pp. 196-197.) 17 Dr. Hinkle perpetrates the old fallacy of taking the groups—Germany, Latin, Anglo-Saxon—for granted and ascribing the mind-habits of individuals—introvert, ex trovert—to the whole unsorted mass, the process itself giving a kind of literary verisimilitude to the two really unconnected ends of the argument. Still another type of analysis, straddling the mental and physical factors and called by its originator the Method of voice-analysis {Sthmnanalysemethode) made its first public appearance in Esthonia in the year 1929. The method is due to the researches of Dr. Willy E. Peters, director of the Phonetics laboratory of the University of Tartu (Dorpat), and it is embodied in three papers 17 See also Dr. Philip S. Graven: "Case Study of a Negro," Psycho- anal. Rev., April, 1930. dealing with the racial type of Mussolini, Tolstoy, Hjalmar Branting, and Graf Zeppelin. Dr. Peters used gramophone discs and the Miller Phonodeik to record the curve of the speech-melody, and analyzed syllable by syllable the "shape" of a text averaging seven lines of print. In so doing, he discovered an "east-falling and a west-rising inflection," taking care first to allow for the effect of the language, syntax, or oratorical device that might overlay the racial inflection with accidentals. Short biographical sketches and mental portraits com plete the check-up on the four representative men chosen. Melodically speaking, they fall into two groups —the staccato-energetic (Mussolini) type and the legato- nervous-depressive (Tolstoy) type. The reason for detailing this and the previous modern innovations in race-determination is not a striving after a kind of picturesqueness. They serve only to illustrate, before embarking on our concluding and, we hope, suf ficiently conclusive chapter, how race-theories have been generated by the type of thinking or the stage of me chanical efficiency that mankind valued at the moment. They confirm the statement found at the opening of the descriptive portion of this book (Chapter II) that race-theories occur in the minds of men for an ulterior purpose which, once set in motion, suggests a literally infinite series of possible systems, more and more com plex as civilization expands, more and more abstract as the changing standards of morality demand an ever more intellectual rationalization for the concealment of primitive aggressiveness and snobbery. Chapter XL RACE: THE MODERN SUPER STITION I ancient maxim: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. modern version: Nothing alien is human to me. IF the reader's patience has not been exhausted by the description of 150 years of race-thinking, sketchy as that description is when compared with the full record, he may like to feel that in reading this chapter, his turn has come to subject the author's views to a searching analysis. For practical purposes, both reader and author are now in possession of the same facts and it is the author's business to show how they substantiate his here tofore scattered objections and repeated generalizations. The reader, on his side, is probably full of pointed ques tions which, unfortunately, must be worded for him: Has there not been throughout a confusion between race-beliefs and merely national pride? Have not the fanatics of race been indiscriminately lumped with writers only occasionally guilty of using race-epithets? Cannot one reject theories of Nordic superiority without being forced to consider Negroes and white men as be longing to the same race? Since the contradictions of 270 many erring minds do not in themselves preclude the possibility that one system is truth, is it legitimate to deny absolutely the existence of race? Even granting that fixed races cannot be found, are there not genuine divisions of mankind into broad groups, proved to be fact by the work of reputable modern scientists? Does not indeed that common aspect of national differences reveal tangible distinctions that have an environmental basis and a cultural significance? Lastly, does not the mere fact of racial belief create the very distinctions spoken of by the racialists? In other words, can an in tellectual process get rid of the social, economic, and cultural facts behind the emotions of race? These questions not only require an answer, but they are precisely the questions that started the author on his original quest. They can best be answered by setting down in some kind of order the conclusions that a searching of the facts has led to. First, a brief review of the ground covered will permit a summary of the major objections to race; these will be followed by positive re marks to take care of the question of national differences; next and last, the views of modern anthropology and genetics about physical differences will bring our enter prise to a close. Starting with the political uses of the Nordic Myth historically evident since Tacitus, and the climate-theory of racial differences which is even older, the course of the argument early established, as the underlying basis of all race-thinking, the assumed correspondence be tween the physical nature and the spiritual products of man. A short account of anthropology showed how the notions of species, variety, and heredity bore upon the idea of race, regardless of its ulterior motives. Con versely, the history of linguistics revealed how the words Celtic, Aryan, and Semitic have provided politicians and scientists with another mold into which to cast their race-ideas, at the very time when the forces of Nation alism, Evolution, Sociology, Imperialism, and Militarism made race-beliefs needful, authoritative, and picturesque. At no point in the narrative did the author consciously describe or discuss race-theories from the point of view of any party, religion, or system. 1 Apart from the em phasis on France, previously explained and motivated, whatever impression of bias may result from the appor tionment of space among the several ideas, races, or authors presented, is purely accidental and must be laid 1 The racialist critic might like to find an "explanation" of this skeptical stand in a book by Francisque Michel, the friend of Mérimée, on The Accursed Races in France and Spain (Paris, 1847). The work describes the inferior position of certain presumed Goths, light-haired and blue-eyed, in Southwestern France, the present writer's ancestral home. On p. 107 of Vol. I, it is said that "in the town of Barzun, there were only two inhabitants belonging to this caste. . . . They have left only one daughter who, though afflicted with goiter, enjoys as great respect and consideration as the other inhabitants." Although the present writer has never set foot in the town of Barzun and his traceable forebears apparently left it a hundred years ago, nevertheless the spirit of tolerance for other "races," so unusual in that part of France, must somehow be in herited in the blood. to faulty composition rather than to insidious selective- ness. As for the blanket denial that races exist until it is proved that they do, it must be ascribed not so much to a desire for singularity or paradox as to an effort towards the open-mindedness that must have preceded the first race-hypothesis ever conceived by the human mind. William James somewhere counsels us for the sake of truth to look at unfamiliar things as if they were fa miliar, and at familiar things as if they were unfamiliar. To deny race after an examination of the major theories in the field is to follow both halves of James's precept at once. It is to look on all human beings as substantially alike until their significant différences have been pinned down realistically; and it is also to force oneself to think as if White, Aryan, Mongoloid, and brachycephalic were words for things as remote from immediate per ception as Syphilitic, Arthritic, and Asthenic—three words that might just as readily be used to divide man kind into distinct groups. By so forcing oneself to await proofs of racial differences, one puts the burden where it really belongs, namely, on the racial historian, scientist, or art-critic, and one is able to apply the ordinary rules of logic and inference to the theories presented, instead of enthusiastically or lazily jumping to a congenial and familiar conclusion. This mental effort likewise justifies the apparent fail ure to differentiate in this book between makers of race- systems and casual users of race-adjectives, for if race is conceded to be a dangerous superstition, the latter are no more excusable than the former. The judges and divines who casually burned a witch because everybody knew that witches were a menace are not to be excused on the ground that they never wrote treatises describing the signs and causes of witchcraft. Is the analogy thought too strong? We judge our neighbors, we incite others to war, we promote or dismiss our inferiors, we damn an author, we accept or reject as immigrants and as vot ing citizens persons whose "race" is the ostensible ground of discrimination. Witch-burning was certainly crude and barbaric, but it lies open to doubt whether concen tration camps and the stirring up of hatred and violence are such obvious proofs of greater enlightenment. These practical applications of race-thinking will re mind the reader that these essays have not presented any detailed accounts of particular race-prejudices. Material interests have been dealt with only in so far as they fur thered the vogue of a race-idea. The reason for this omission is twofold. There are in the first place any number of excellent works dealing with just the factors of economic, social, and political struggle beneath par ticular race-antagonisms, be they in modern Poland, in the Southern States, or in Spain before the expulsion of the Moors. The only value in dealing with race generally as a mode of thinking was precisely to show that it had always been a practical device and that its forms are reducible to a common pattern. In the modern world race-thinking uses history, it uses philology, it uses an thropology to cover up realities that should be dealt with in their own terms. The writer, when he has been rash enough to speak his thoughts to casual acquaintances has often been inter rupted by questions of the common type: How would you like your sister to marry a Negro? Or, do you mean to say you think an Eskimo is your intellectual equal? 2 These bland flatteries are very little to the point, for no argument has ever been advanced by any reasonable man against the fact of differences among men. The whole argument is about what differences exist and how they are to be gauged. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing within the scope of this book to deter a man from lynching, from abhorring mixed marriages, or from despising swarthy complexions. The objection that is repeatedly made is to the validity of the reasons usually offered and to the confusion of the moral issues in volved. It is impossible to fight the real forces behind race-hatreds until they have been uncovered by the gen eral recognition that race-pretexts are a piece of uncon scious hypocrisy or of willful camouflage. Lynching re quires perhaps no very great courage, but a man who came to see that he participated in lynchings for sadistic fun, for releasing anger, or for expressing fear would 2 More formal utterances of the same kind are not wanting: "Would any amount of training ever make the average Chinese as good a boatman as the average Eskimo, or could the average Eskimo by any possibility be as careful and patient a farmer as the Chinese?" asks Dr. Ellsworth Huntington in The Pulse of Progress. be more deserving of respect and more amenable to re form than one who justified himself with the self- righteous conviction that the Negroes are a sub-human race akin to the apes. The problems of colored popula tions, of immigration and miscegenation, of anti-Semitism and national hatred are not problems about a natural fact called race: they are probems of social life, of eco nomic status, of educational policy, and of political or ganization. The undeniable presence of the race-idea creates a separate psychological problem which it has been the purpose of this history to elucidate. Each in dividual can work upon his own mental habits as he chooses, but the helpful formula runs roughly as fol lows: Those human beings who have not lost their pigmenta tion are simply more clearly marked than others for discrimination; they wear a uniform that they cannot take off, but they are not alone in their plight. Others have eyes, noses, or brogues to distinguish them in a rough-and-ready way and make them bear all the faults or all the virtues supposedly inherent in the group to which they are said to belong. Those faults and those virtues are themselves social in origin. We remember the "Jew" or the "Irishman" 3 who stepped on our toes with out apologizing where we forget a dozen others not so striking to our dull and hasty senses. Among the Hot- 3 The difference between the anti-Jewish prejudice in New York and the anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice in Boston is both an example and a proof of the social basis beneath the race-feeling. tentots any white man would be similarly noticeable and alien, while those among our fellow-whites who have offended us but who have escaped classification have done so only by the accident of inconspicuousness. For all we know, the forgotten Nordics who have been rude to us were all tagged with invisible characteristics—say, stomach ulcers—and were working off their physiological irritation on our toes. Striking differences are far from being proved significant differences, but they are the tokens whereby group antagonisms perpetuate them selves, like Kentucky feuds, together with the inferiority or degradation of one group which the other originally assumed to exist. In Nature there are, to use the words of Buffon and Lamarck, no genera; there are only in dividuals until we class them arbitrarily according to particular criteria for particular purposes, as when we choose men between the ages of 20 and 30 for military service. Such a classification means something because it means only one thing. Extending the same reasoning serves to invalidate all comparisons, crude or complicated, between the mental ity of Eskimos and Western Europeans. Obviously, the Eskimo who could not write or read these lines could thrive in an environment where the writer would promptly starve and freeze to death. More universally put, intellectual achievements defy comparison. This is equally true of persons and of groups. There are no standards of truly general intelligence, the so-called in telligence tests being, in the eyes of their makers, com bined tests of special techniques, such as book-learning, visual imagination, and so forth. With present methods there is furthermore no way of knowing a group ex cept by rough sampling and no way of agreeing about the value of the ends sought by diverse cultural groups. What is true of inter-cultural comparisons is all the more true of the inter-racial comparisons attempted by art-critics and philosophers concerning two great artists or leaders belonging to the same tradition of Western civilization. For that tradition itself is not one thing but many. This diversity of traditions forces us to tackle the question of "national" as against "racial" differences, but before making a start, the objections to race are here listed and labeled, according to our promise of winding up the negative side before furnishing some positive suggestions on our subject. OBJECTIONS 1. General Inconsistency. Whether any one race- theory be true or not, the fact that there exists no con sensus of opinion about race-terminology, its applica tion, or its proofs, at once puts race-thinking outside the pale of logical and scientific verification. Incon sistency is the rule both between any two systems and within any one. Some anthropological congresses have discovered and discussed as many as 100 races. 2. Pretense of Materialism. The idea of race can start from two premises; either that a given physique pro duces a given mentality, or that a given mentality reveals some hidden physical similarity. In both cases there is a gap left by all racialists without exception, between the physical fact and its mental overtone. Proof of material causation is not shown in either of the two possible ways: I. It is not shown that wherever sign A occurs (let us say, a dolichocephalic skull), result B (the qual ity of initiative) is present, and that wherever A is absent B is also absent. II. It is not shown that even though we may not know what the physical factor at work is, when ever several signs A, B, C, D, are present, the quality X is also present. For example, that the Germans, a loose term involving signs A, B, C, D, are the only people who are distinguished in the world of science. 3. Actual Mysticism. Race-theories of whatever kind all lead to a point where the proponent drops his show of scientific analysis and begs the question. He says in effect the Nordic race is a group apart; it is the great est race. Why? Just look at its conquests, look at Colum bus, Nelson, and Thomas A. Edison—all Nordics. But what made these men great? The racial something that they had in common. Now, how do you know who are Nordics? Simply by applying the definition of Nordic race. 4. Elusiveness. No system of race-belief stays within its original natural limits. If it is an historical system, it drags in science or pseudo-science; if it is scientific, it leans on historical or pseudo-historical facts; if philo logical, it relies on the other two disciplines. The proofs of any system are proofs only by assuming the truth of other "facts" found in the field beyond the one where the investigator originally bade you look. 5. Statistical Fallacy. A race is by definition a group of individuals and the distinguishing characteristics of the group must be those characteristics by which they differ from other groups of exactly the same composi tion save in that one respect; that is to say, men's skulls from one group must not be compared with women's skulls from another. Age, diet, and occupation ought also to be common to both groups if the racial dif ference between them is to appear clearly and indis putably. It is obvious that the number of facts about man living in society is much too great to permit so exact a grouping of qualities for comparison. Even rough ap proximation is not generally attempted, and if achieved would still expose the results to the objection that a dis tinguished statistician has raised against his own craft: "Statistical methods are only necessary in so far as ex periment fails to attain its ideal . . . they are to the ex perimenter a warning of failure." (G. Udny Yule in Brit. Jour. Psych., XII, p. 106.) 6. Fallacy of Exception. Accustomed as we are to approximate rules, we readily accept the answer of "ex ception" when we can point to one or more individuals who do not fit the definition given by the systematic racialist. It is generally overlooked that if race is an un changing factor allowing us to make divisions among human beings, it must not break down at any point. It is easily understood how an individual can vary from the cultural pattern. He may have been reared in isola tion or in a spirit of rebellion. But how can the one thing that is transmissible by way of generation fail to be transmitted? It is as if a human being were born oviparous through "exception" to the rule that says men are viviparous vertebrates. 7. Duplicity of Motives. Very few works dealing with race can be cleared of the charge that they were inspired and carried through for some other motive than the discovery of race-divisions. In the light of so many admissions by the authors themselves that if they prove their race-contention, then some other conclusion of the greatest importance follows, it can be said that race-theories are motivated by irrelevant interests and not by curiosity, which in turn explains the slovenli ness, inaccuracy, and illogicalness of virtually every sys tem. 8. Rhetorical Devices. Although all discourse is com pelled by the limitations of language to use images and analogies, the mystical nature of race-belief forces its apostles to use figurative language literally. Mein Blut spricht is a typical metaphor the literal application of which, as we have seen, leads men to war and donors of blood for transfusion to jail. Terms like "melanized" or "mongoloid" or even "the blending of races" are also metaphorical expressions that sound plausible only when we do not insist that they raise in the mind definite pictures of human events. Race-theories are not only bad science; they are bad poetry. 9. Tautology. In discussions of culture the use of race- epithets does not add to an understanding of the ques tion in hand, but merely dismisses it. To say that "Mar tin Luther is the incarnation of the instinct of his race" (Montégut), is to leave a critical reader absolutely in the dark. Even a treatise by the author explaining what he means by race would not bring additional information about Luther's life and work, since the only reason Luther is spoken of at all is that he diverged from the common run of his compatriots. The critic, by invoking the vague characteristics of the mass, does not get nearer his subject but farther away from it. Race does not cover cultural facts, it covers them up. 10. Predestination and Obscurantism. The philo sophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality. Pushed to its extreme, race sup poses that from the moment of conception and by con ception, the nature and mind of an individual are pre destined. The thousand incidents and accidents compos ing a life are mere footnotes to a text that was written ab ovo. In such a world, eugenics must replace education and physical culture must take precedence over social reform. Writing in a Chicago magazine at the turn of the century Topinard doubted whether "reason and education ought to try to interfere with the products of natural evolution." (The Monist, 1897, II, p. 600.) In fact, if race is all-powerful, tampering with it is im possible, which reduces mankind to a kind of ineffable essence being carried around intact and intangible within the bodies of the living and expressing no more and no less than it was prehistorically fated to do. il. Absolutism. In the realm of politics, science, and philosophic materialism, race stands as an absolute, a first cause, an unmoved mover. In a real world of shift ing appearances, race satisfies man's demand for cer tainty by providing a small, simple, and complete cause for a great variety of large and complex events. On the one hand, race appeals to those who find discomfort in relativity—hence its charm for fascists; on the other, it appeals to all the lovers of teleology and simple de terminism—hence its reappearance among many com munists in the form of the absolute class-myth. 4 The bourgeois and the capitalist become genetic entities apart from individuals, and produce inherent strife apart from immediate desires. Needless to say, neither Marx nor Lenin is responsible for such a stultification of reality, any more than Plato and Aristotle were re sponsible for the quarrel of Nominalists and Realists of 4 See Frederick L. Schuman's excellent comparison of race and class in The Nazi Dictatorship (p. 115) and Margaret Schlauch's substitution of class for national determinism in linguistics. (Marxian Quarterly, Science and Society , I, No. x.) which race-thinking is only the latest manifestation. 12. Utopianism. The irony of race-theories is that they arise almost invariably from a desire to mould others' action rather than to explain facts. From Tacitus to Gobineau the great racial ideas have come from disap pointed men. In modern Germany, which passes for the one instance of race-doctrine triumphant, the movement originated in despair. Van den Bruck wrote The Third Reich at the lowest ebb of national egoism and killed himself before the materializing of his pathetic appeal. Rosenberg and Darre illustrate the same point: racialism is an alternative to madness for intelligent educated men balked in what they consider their legitimate ambitions. It is a faith rooted in the consciousness of worth and confirmed by the Tertullian principle of Certum est quia impossibile. II 1 used to flatter ?nyself on guessing at people's nationality by their faces and, as a rule, 1 guessed aright. This faded, crumpled, vaporous beauty, I conceived, was a German. . . . —henry james in Eugene Yickering HENRY JAMES'S pastime of guessing at nationality is so universal and, as he hints, so flattering to one's de tective powers, that it stands as the obvious second line of defense for everyone whose outerworks of racial be liefs have been blasted. A whole library of books by eminent writers like Brownell, Madariaga, and Pittard endeavors to show that nationality, not race, is the fac tor making for similarity within large groups. In popu lar and educated conversation nothing is more common than references to the American type, the average Frenchman, and other abstractions of the sort which cultivated people know to be rough approximations but which they none the less use in their thinking as if they were exact and definite. The first noteworthy fact about these ideas is that they usually apply to foreigners. When a man familiar with the history of his own nation at tempts to draw up the characteristics of the national type, he generally finds it difficult in direct proportion to the amount and vividness of his knowledge. James Trus- low Adams admitted as much with winning candor when the New York Times Magazine asked him to discover the American type. The headline-writer, presumably not Mr. Adams, was clearly disappointed and he rationalized his disappointment by saying: An Observer Finds It Difficult, in This Land of Varied Regions and Peoples, to Set Down Charac teristics, Racial or Otherwise, That are Repre sentative and Distinctive 5 We are at once in the midst of our problem: there are, not only in America, but everywhere, "varied regions 0 May 19, 1935. and peoples" and an observer who deserves the name finds it "difficult to set down distinctive characteristics." It may be objected in rebuttal that, on the contrary, there are perfectly plain national and regional charac ters, that a Yankee is not like a Virginian or an Irishman like a Bulgarian. Who could deny the differences that occur to the mind when comparing a Virginian and a New Englander? No one, but the counter-rebuttal is perhaps as stiff a poser, namely, how exact is the corre spondence between the things that readily occur to the mind and the reality of life? The question is, in fact, a tangle of separate questions. First, are the differences that we "at once think of" differences that apply to all mem bers of each group? Second, are those differences greater than those existing within each group? Third, what are the group differences traceable to?—heredity, occupa tion, income, or environment? Fourth, does the word environment mean soil and climate or does it include custom and tradition? A thorough thrashing-out of these and related issues would require a multitude of remarks and examples and a body of exact information that might well form a neglected branch of study—the Psychology of Traveling. To attempt it here is impossible, but a few suggestions can be made on the topic of What Can a Man Believe About Large Groups. Granted that a German and a Frenchman differ, at least as soon as we have been told which is which, let us see what it is reasonable to assume. Our first instinct is to suppose that they differ fundamentally, but com- mon sense bids us take stock of certain outward mat ters, chiefly clothing, tricks of speech, and social be havior, all traceable to a certain environment. That en vironment, nine times out of ten, is far more localized than it seems, that is to say, it is a regional, an occu pational, a social, or a class environment. On this point the Marxists are right to insist, and by the same token they are wrong to transform their perception into a totalitarian absolute. The proof of localized environment being a truer index than the national is that we are apt to mistake the "class" of a foreigner much more than that of a compatriot, even when we know to what na tionality the foreigner belongs. The same conclusion can be arrived at from the other side equally well. What do we mean by a Frenchman? Is it anybody born in France, be it in Brittany or Dauphiné, Paris or Mar seille? Are these people more nearly alike than they are like Englishmen and Italians? Racialists of a physiological turn of mind answer: No. National-minded racialists shout: Yes. The decision ultimately rests on a quantita tive judgment of human traits. Is a French country doc tor more like a French peasant than he is like a Ger man country doctor? But is it sound psychology to sup pose a man is ever all of one piece, always honest or always scientific? As soon as we probe these appealing but superficial aggregates of human character we run into the difficulty of weighing imponderables; we be come not merely psychologists but metaphysicians. Con sider, for example, the extreme nationalist in France and in Germany. The objects of their love and hatred are of course precisely opposite. The one hates Germany; the other hates France. But the thinking process, the language, and the activity of both men are precisely alike. The facts would almost justify postulating a Chauvinist Race cutting across other classifications and differing markedly from the Cosmopolitan Race. It is clear that a cosmopolitan race does not exist, but that there are cosmopolites in many nations who have in the course of time established a cosmopolitan tradi tion. In things not of the mind there are likewise tradi tions or habits. Eating peas with a knife no doubt runs in families, and it is the sum of these habits and tradi tions that forms individual or regional character. What must be found out, then, about a nation or an individ ual is not the single epithet that Chekhov was looking for to embrace the whole blessed mass but the sum of traditions that constitute the cultural pattern of the group or the man. As individuals of the Western world we belong in various ways to hundreds or thousands of traditions. Some of them are national and are acquired through language, ritual, and history; some of them are regional and rest on economic, social, and dialectic peculiarities; others are still more limited and come from education, family background, and one's own unique ex periences. It is, once more, an oversimplification and a denial of the infinite plasticity of the human mind to suppose that once a man's birthplace or income has been ascertained he has been fully revealed and stands there like an exploded riddle. At the same time, the conditions of modern life make men act more and more in collective units, in large anonymous groups that merge individualities out of ex istence. Nationalism and democracy are but two mani festations of this tendency, and Mérimée was right when he said that racial historiography was the democratic form of dynastic history. But in order to know what we are talking about when describing groups, we must take the same precautions as when talking about a single per son. Large groups are always forming and re-forming out of different constituents. Unseen forces change so- called national characters and national purposes. In the eighteenth century, the Germans were a dreamy and philosophical lot—so we are told; fifty years later they are practical industrialists and conquerors. In the six teenth century, the English were regarded by the Spaniards as extravagant and ungovernable; in the nine teenth, they had become dull, repressed, and stingy—a nation of shopkeepers. If history and criticism pretend to enlighten us by using national epithets, these must be circumstantial about time, place, and persons. The French nation in August, 1914, can be treated as a uni fied group because a certain emotion was uppermost and compelling. By 1917, that unity had dissipated: mutiny and defeatism were in the air. In time of peace, workers, employers, or university professors unite for particular objects during a certain lapse of time, permitting de- scriptive generalizations, but all statements based on vague classifications, national or professional, are always false, save by accident. Even in constituted bodies like a Legislature or a Medical Association, it must always be remembered that there are minorities of whom what is true is the exact opposite of the majority truth. Minori ties may be of no importance in practical life, but in judgments, in histories, in anything resembling a desire to know the recording of divergence is the third dimension necessary to a life-like portrayal. The urge is strong to speak of groups as if their actions formed an indivisible total, and it is hard to be sure which of the infinite num ber of differences are significant, but usually that dis covery is the whole point of the investigation, as when Napoleon III consulted his Prefects to find out whether France was ready for war with Prussia. More than half said no: he disregarded them in favor of the other, more congenial view, and so put himself back into the state of ignorance from which he had tried to lift himself by asking. The same error is committed by any false as sumption of unanimity. If the notion of flexible cultural traditions is accepted and a clear picture kept in mind of what the make-up of a man or a group includes, there are still many obstacles in the way of sanely judging a foreign nation or a social class. The first lies in our personal error—our unfamiliar- ity with the foreign language, our misinterpretation of social usages, the small range of our observations, too often bearing on shopkeepers and hotel proprietors rather than on the motley millions who form the people about whom we talk so glibly. The second consists in the presence of ready-made formulas. The mind tends to see only what has been pointed out to it, and a theatrical tradition has accustomed us to feel that one good trait implies every good trait and conversely. Be tween these two aberrations, it is extraordinarily diffi cult to keep, as it were, a painter's eye on the object. That is why observers of national traits so often fall back on race or so often ascribe to nationality all the biologi cal attributes that they have just denied in repudiating racial explanations. Says André Siegfried: "The person ality of a nation is a striking thing. A people lives, be haves and reacts like an organism, and, when highly civilized, like an individual." (N. Y. Times Magazine, July 24, 1932.) In the light of many similar remarks, the identical treatment accorded race and nation in these essays is self-explanatory. The identification originates in the writers whose opinions we have reviewed. Many of them say, in so many words, the modern nations are races. The class-concept is liable to the same misuse and so is any broad classification that has not been tested by try ing to fit into it all the facts on the classifier's hands. The fanatical systematizer as well as the careless writer pre fers to throw out or forget inconvenient facts rather than drop his generality. This is so true in the literary critic's use of national and racial epithets that the way in which the fallacy can be seen through and reduced to absurdity must be briefly shown as our final word on the subject. Let us take another cue from Havelock Ellis and con sider George Bernard Shaw with the aid of race and nationality. Our subject happens to be a wit, an Irish man, and a socialist. What easier than to explain his wit by the axiom that "all Irishmen are witty" (despite the equally profound belief in dumb Irishmen) and his so cialism by a reference to the economic miseries of Ire land. Nothing has really been explained, but the read er's mind is somehow satisfied about Shaw's make-up because he has heard of Irish wit and Irish poverty and because race-explanations are familiar to him. Now suppose the reader does not stop thinking where the critic stops but goes on to recall a few other com monplaces, equally in good standing; for example that the Irish are Celts and that the Celts are melancholy, un practical, and passionate individualists. Shaw is none of these things. Then let another Irishman, say William Butler Yeats, be brought into the mental picture. Where are the common effects of race or nationality? The racial-national classification has broken down, powerless as it is to embrace divergent cultural traditions. Taking refuge in environmental influences is of no avail, for Irish poverty is agricultural poverty, and just as we knew about Celtic Melancholy so we know that peas ants are individualistic and reactionary. Shaw therefore could not possibly be a socialist if he were "really and truly" an Irishman. Shall we throw out Shaw as untypi- cal? Why not throw out Yeats? Or can we enlarge our racial concept "Irish" to include both? But there may be still other exceptions, suggesting that we should be come not more general but more particular, by examin ing the facts of Shaw's own life as a Protestant Dubliner with a particular background, a particular mother and father and a particular history of his oivn. Proceeding one step farther, let us ask whether the class mind is a truer index to personality than the racial mind. Shaw's thinking, his activity, and his art are all permeated by his socialist convictions; but his income, his outward behavior, and ninety percent of his social contacts are bourgeois or, if you will, capitalistic. To call him either a bourgeois mind or a revolutionary mind without further qualification is patently absurd. Yet we are not dealing with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but a public person held to greater consistency than the average, whose thinking is no doubt due in large part to his environment. That environment is roughly the same as that which conditioned the thinking of the late Sir Austen Chamberlain. Still, the two men reach diametrically opposed political faiths. As Britishers sub ject to the same London environment they have only citizenship and perhaps a few historical symbols in com mon. Their accents and their clothes are not the same, even their diets are not alike, for Shaw is a vegetarian— a biological factor which brings us to a consideration of what are tenable physiological views regarding the grouping of human beings. III Was ever Tartar fierce and cruel Upon the strength of water gruel? But who can stand his fire and force When first he rides, then eats his horse! —Samuel butler, Hudibras ALL racial groupings according to fixed factors, such as skull or pigmentation, having failed to bring order out of chaos, certain modern observers trained in science and free from political prejudice have recaptured the initial humility of scientific investigation and patiently begun again with a careful survey of their facts and logic. They have ceased to look for a simple, single, fixed cause of diversity in human beings and have studied instead the variables of environment and heredity. Environment in this new sense is no longer an un changing force, determined by the degree of latitude and expressible as Northern or Southern, but a complex of separate and obscure agents among which, owing to its direct connection with the formation of the adult body, diet seems to be most important. Diet affects the characteristics associated with race in three ways—stature, coloring, and shape of skull. An interesting statistical fact peculiar to the United States first revealed the connection between diet and physique. It was found that the children born in the United States of Southern European immigrants tended to be taller than their parents. If the Sicilian "race" were of a fixed size and physique, then the facts discovered were an im possibility, an optical illusion. But if the effect of diet were tentatively assumed capable of producing such re sults, then a fruitful avenue of investigation was opened. Determining whether it was the abundance of milk or vitamins, or a difference in the water supply on this continent that "caused" the physical modification was another and more laborious matter. Further statistics were collected and collated, showing the relative height of peoples subsisting on rice and those eating meat. A general hypothesis was inferable which stated that if the food eaten produces more energy than the body requires, that surplus is stored in the form of bone or tissue with a consequent alteration of bodily appearance. The rela tion of the jaw to the size of the skull being normally constant it follows that changes in the size of the jaw through the use of diet must affect the size of the skull. If acquired characteristics can be transmitted, diet once again accounts in part for one of the supposed racial characteristics. Color depends upon a more involved process by no means fully explored as yet. It appears as if the salt con tent in the system bore some relation to pigmentation by hastening or retarding the deposit of color pigment under the transparent skin. Light and heat are known within common experience to affect color, but the ex act conditions producing a certain degree or permanence of color has not been determined. Professor Nelson of Columbia University, who has been working with enzymes for fifteen years, has also isolated the particular one, called Tyrosinase, which is the principal catalytic agent of pigmentation. Dr. Mark Graubard, of the same University, is simultaneously trying to find whether the enzyme exists in the chromosomes of dark-colored in sects. All that a layman should retain on the color ques tion is an open mind grasping only the capital fact that color is not a single characteristic but a component of variables as yet unnumbered and unpredictable. Both diet and the chemistry of pigmentation raise the problem of hereditary transmission which our first chap ter declared to be central in any future theory of race. Two groups of scientists, both of them discarding the hypothesis of race, have attacked the problem. The an thropologists—chiefly Franz Boas, R. H. Lowie, A. A. Goldenweiser, and Alfred L. Kroeber—have, by a com parative and descriptive study of primitive and "civi lized" peoples, arrived at a new formulation of the fact of bodily similarity. That formulation answers not so much the question, "What is transmitted?" a genetic problem, but "Who are transmitted?" a problem of de scriptive anthropology. Thus the presence in Ireland of many persons with blue eyes and black hair reveals not a race, but a family. It happens that this family is more plentiful in Ireland than elsewhere, but it does not con stitute a race because its characteristics are neither fixed nor certain of transmission. The inveterate racialists never stopped to examine whether the offspring of par ents that they dubbed Nordic inevitably showed the same Nordic symptoms. A great poet saw more truly when he wrote: "I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion." 1 The distinction between a race and a family presents a double aspect. First of all, it excludes entirely any objective connection between a genetic line and a cul tural pattern, in the second place, it throws back upon the student of genetics the problem of predicting morphological kinship. For example, had the Great Elector of Prussia wanted his tall grenadiers to procreate a fresh generation of tall grenadiers for his royal suc cessor, he would have had a harder time arranging for it than Hitler and Darré' seem to think. In the words of Boas: "The existence of diverse genetic lines is clearly proved by family resemblance between parents and children and between brothers and sisters. It is necessary to determine the degree of genetic complexity in a popu lation. Obviously, if all families were genetically alike and uninfluenced by outer circumstances, there would be no family resemblances because for any one member 1 Hardy, Moments of Vision. of a family, one of another family may be substituted. In a closely inbred population something of that kind may be expected, but no such case is known in which an identity of family lines, such as is nearly attained in pure breeds of domesticated animals, is found." The geneticist on whom has fallen the whole burden of research as a result of this substitution of family for race, attacks the problem from the opposite side. He deals with genes and chromosomes, the supposed carriers of characteristics involved in sexual reproduction. Knowledge of these elements, far from assuring pre dictability in the form of particular parts in the offspring, reveals only the tremendous complexity of the mecha nism. Professor H. S. Jennings of Johns Hopkins Uni versity declares there is no such thing as a unit-carrier of characters. "At least 50 genes must work together to produce a single feature such as red eye," in the fruit fly. No set of genes predetermines just one set of characters and no other. The racialist's hope of physical predestina tion fails again: "Characters are not inherited at all; cer tain material which will produce a particular character under certain conditions is inherited." (Quoted by G. A. Dorsey in Beard's Whither Mankind, p. 242.) The greatest authority on the subject, T. H. Morgan, indicates the relevance of his findings to social problems: "If within each human social group the geneticist finds it impossible to discover with any reasonable certainty the genetic basis of behavior, the problems must seem extraordinarily difficult when groups are contrasted with each other where the differences are obviously con nected not only with material advantages and disadvan tages resulting from location, climate, soil and mineral wealth, but with traditions, customs, religious taboos, conventions and prejudices." ( Evol. & Gen., p. 207.) Race-thinking was called at the close of our first chapter a superstition, that is, according to Webster, "a belief, an act, or a practice . . . regarded as irrational, idle or injurious." The truth or falsity of this appellation is not to be measured by the amount of illustrative evi dence presented hitherto or in the appendix and bibli ography still to come. It lies rather in the inherent vice of the thinking behind Race. Nearly a hundred years ago, John Stuart Mill said: "Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and char acter to inherent natural differences." (Polit. Econ., Vol. I, p. 390.) In that calm statement is condensed the nature and danger of the error. It is a vulgar error, not only because it thrives and is abroad among the people, often unaware of itself, but always charged with hatred and hypocrisy; it is also and above all a vulgar error because it denies individual diversity, scouts the complexity of cause and effect, scorns the intellect, and ultimately bars Mind from the universe of created things. Appendix. RACE-THINKING: A BRIEF AN THOLOGY THE following excerpts have been chosen to illustrate the extremes and the commonplaces of race-thinking. The excuse for the repetitiousness lies in the spectacle of distinguished minds entertaining the vulgar error or vulgar minds giving birth to extraordinary notions. The headings used to break up the sequence are, like the theories they cover, neither exact, nor logical, nor mutu ally exclusive. notables Cecil Rhodes (c. 1900) The furtherance of the British Empire for the bring ing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one empire. What a dream! But yet it is probable. It is a possible. ( Last Will and Testament, p. 33.) Briand on Locarno policy (c. 1926) I am a Celt: it needed the imagination of a Celt to at tempt this foreign policy. (Quoted from Louis Piérard, Socialist Deputy from Möns and an intimate of Briand, by Emile Buré and reported by VEcho de Paris, Dec. 4, 1 93 3, with the comment: "If one recalls that Lloyd George also was a Celt, one will be forced to admit that the Celts deserve the gratitude of the Germans.") 301 Louis Blanc (1872) It is the energetic development of soul and spirit that makes the races strong and it is the strong races that make great peoples. ( Discours, Nov. 25, 1872.) B ernard Shaw (1928) The Nordic race beloved of North America and Ger man "blonde beasts" may be a romantic fiction; but when we speak of a Nordic temperament and a Latin temperament we are indicating facts which distinguish the north from the south of Europe as they distinguish the north from the south of America; and these facts may deadlock or greatly hamper Geneva until it recog nizes that the Federation of the World will come before the Parliament of Man, which can hardly be realized until Man becomes a much less miscellaneous lot than he is at present. (What 1 Really Wrote About the War, P- 3 6 3-) Charles Darwin (1871) There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the rela tive proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull and even in the convolutions of the brain. ( The Descent of Man, Ch. VII, p. 167.) Karl Marx (c. 1880) This does not prevent the same economic basis from showing infinite variations and gradations in its appear- ance, even though its principal conditions are every where the same. This is due to innumerable outside cir cumstances, natural environment, race peculiarities, out side historical influences, and so forth, all of which must be ascertained by careful analysis. ( Capital, III, p. 919.) Maurice Barrés (1894) According to race, Hegelianism produces special com binations. It produced Proudhon in France . . . Max Stirner and the sacred law of egotism in Germany. . . . In an absolute Marxist state, the influence of race, occu pation and climate would soon regain their power. (De Hegel aux Cantines du Nord, p. 26.) T. H. Huxley (1894) The criminal law . . . prevents the propagation of hereditary criminal tendencies; and the poor-law, in so far as it separates married couples whose destitution arises from hereditary defects of character, are doubtless selective agents operating in favor of the non-criminal and the more effective members of society. ( Evolution and Ethics , p. 38.) Galton (1869) The Negro race is some two grades below our own, [the Anglo-Saxon]. ( Hereditary Genius , p. 327.) Paul Broca (1873) Buffon, for lack of precise data, was unable to raise his thinking to the notion of race. ( Mém II, p. 415.) Chateaubriand (1833) Charlemagne had the Germans' natural taste for music. {Anal. Hist, de France, p. 38.) Balzac (1846) This strange alliance seemed to be the result of a strong will acting ceaselessly on a weak character, on that inconsistency peculiar to the Slavs which, while giving them heroic courage in battle, accounts for their incredible disorder in conduct, a moral flabbiness whose causes ought to interest the physiologists, for physiolo gists are to politics what entomologists are to agriculture. (Cousine Bette, p. 71.) Taine (1890) Manifestly, he [Napoleon] is neither a Frenchman nor a man of the eighteenth century. He belongs to an other race and another century. . . . Italian he was, by extraction and by blood. ( Régime Moderne , I, pp. 5-6.) Henry James (1900) With his diminutive stature and his perpendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuberant eyes, high peremptory voice ... he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. ( A Little Tour in France, pp. 202-3.) George Meredith (1875) Mr. Romfrey entertained no profound fellow-feeling for the Negro and except as the representative of a cer tain amount of working power commonly requiring the whip to wind it up, he inclined to despise the black spot in the creation. . . . (Be auch amp's Career, p. 86.) John Livingston Loaves (1936) Moreover, this same simple and sensuous quality shows itself in another way—in the inexpugnable racial tendency of the Hebrew mind to express not only emo tions, but ideas, in apt and telling imagery. ( Essays in Appreciation , p. 9.) Henry Fairfield Osborn (1924) The Northern races, as is well known to anthropolo gists, include all those peoples which originally occupied the western plateau of Asia and traversed Northern Europe, certainly as early as 12,000 b.c. . . . They in vaded the countries to the South, not only as conquerors but as contributors of strong moral and intellectual ele ments to more or less decadent civilizations. Through the Nordic tide which flowed into Italy came the an cestors of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Titian; also according to Günther, of Giotto, Donatello, Botti celli, Andrea del Sarto, Petrarch and Tasso. . . . Colum bus from his portraits and from busts, authentic or not, was clearly of Nordic ancestry. Kossuth was a Calvinist and of noble family, and there is a presumption in favor of his being a Nordic; Kosciusko and Pulaski were mem bers of a Polish nobility which at that time was largely Nordic. Coligny, Colbert, Richelieu, Lafayette, and Rochambeau, beyond all question were of French (Nor man) Nordic nobility, and in modern France we observe that two of the leaders in the recent great struggle, Joffre and Foch, are both Nordic, while Clemenceau and Poincaré 1 are of Alpine blood. France includes among her great artists Rodin, of Nordic origin; among her leading literary men, Lamartine, Racine, Anatole France, all Nordics. The intellectual influence of the Northern race is also apparent in Spain where it appears in her greatest men of letters, Cervantes; also in Portugal in the poet-hero Camoëns, whose ancestors were Gothic. Of the fighting stock of Italy, Napoleon, although born in Corsica, was descended from the old Lombard nobil ity, of Nordic origin, and it is probable that Garibaldi with his Teutonic name was largely of Northern stock. . . . (N. Y. Times , April 8, 1924.) Samuel Butler (1879) Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essen tially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic character istic. ( Alps and Sanctuaries, p. 142.) Léon Daudet (1921) The work of the Semite is revolution, the overthrow of the autochthonous by the nomads. (On Edouard Drumont, Revue Universelle, Jan. 1, 1921, p. 28.) Rudyard Kipling (c. 1900) The Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present day, of the British sailorman. (Quoted in Fowler, The Kings English, p. 43.) D. B. Wyndham Lewis (1928) The Gauls and Latins have ever been indifferent alike to loud noises and strong smells. ( François Villon, p. 40.) Emerson (1856) Again, as if to inténsate the influences that are not of race, what we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district. ( English Traits, p. vi.) Roheim and Freud (1932) With Freud's Totem and Taboo a new science has come into being. . . . "We sometimes call it psycho analytical anthropology, but we all believe it will be the only anthropology of the future." (Roheim, Internat. Jour. Psychoanal ., 1932, p. 6.) Malvina Hoffman and Chicago Field Museum (1930-36) Have proposition to make, do you care to consider it? Racial types to be modelled while travelling round the world —Field Museum. The sculptress accepted and contributed to the Hall of Man, among other racial types: the Nordic type, the Elusive Alpine, Study of Mixed Type, and a Symbolic Group portraying the White, Yellow, and Black Races, with "each figure holding the weapon by which the race has defended its own boundaries." (Malvina Hoff man, Heads and Tales, pp. i, 6, 161, 135, 334-) mystics Baron Ernest Seìllière (1902-11) The mysticism of race, which has played almost no part in France . . . (Les Mystiques du Néo-Romantisme, p. ni.) No doubt he [Charles de Villers] has, as a Lorrainer, a little German blood in his veins, but he has less of it than Mme de Staël. ( Revue de Paris, Oct. 1, 1902, p. 599-) Edgar Quinet (1831) The power of new ideas in the Germanies, so un fathomable and so incorporeal . . . arises to confront us like the very genius of a race, ... of that Germanic race . . . which is beginning to enter modern history like a flood . . . and which is only awaiting its oppor tunity. ( France et Allejjiagne, pp. 22-24.) Emile Faguet (1895-1906) Race is the consciousness of self attaching to institu tions, religion, climate, customs, mores, history and lan guage. ( Revue Latine, Oct. 25, 1906, p. 590.) The barbarian is, after all, of the same race as the Roman and the Greek. He is our cousin. The Yellow man, the Black man, is not in the least our cousin. . . . Will there be a renaissance, a white soul under a yel low skin? (Jour, des Débats, July 25, 1895, soir.) Beri (1900) Religions are not merely doctrines, they are races. (Grande Revue, Oct. 1, 1900, p. 7.) W. T. Stead (1902) The English-speaking race stood to Mr. Rhodes for all that the Catholic church stood to Ignatius Loyola. (Last Will and Testament, p. 63.) Vacher de Lapouge (1899) What makes an individual act is the legion of his an cestors buried in the earth. (U Aryen: Son Rôle Social, pp. 350-1.) LeBon (1912) Race plays a mighty rôle in revolutions . . . mixed breeds are ungovernable. . . . The soul of the race is the strongest braking power upon social upheaval. (La Révol. Française et la Psychol, des Révol., pp. 53, 68.) Marius-Ary Le blond (1933) If it is the study of French History that guided him [Hanotaux] to politics and in his foreign policies, it is the spiritual contemplation of the Mediterranean that inspired his wisdom. It differs, however, from that of the ancient Greeks ... he remained therefore above all a great African with a missionary soul. (Eclaireur de Nice, Nov. 19, 1933.) Alex Small (1933) At the risk of appearing to be seeking sunshine in cucumbers, I find something more in Hitlerism than can be described in any formulas. After the program has been defined—a program which has in it something for everyone—remains the impression that the essential has not been touched. It looks like a new religion, one which has not yet made its doctrine rigid. ( Paris Chicago- Tribune, Sept. il, 1933.) MEN OF SCIENCE /. Laumonier (1885) Around the positive notion of race must revolve the explanation of historical events. . . . That notion is physiological and psychological; we owe it to the school of Broca. ( Revue Scient ., July, p. 112.) Sigmund Freud (1930) Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of German world-dominion evoked a comple mentary movement towards anti-semitism; and it is quite intelligible that the attempt to establish a new commu nistic type of culture in Russia should find psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, however, how the Soviets will manage when they have exterminated their bourgeois entirely.— (Civi lization and Its Discontents, p. 91.) Lapouge (1899) Good observers among gynecologists claim they can recognize the race of a woman merely by examining her genital organs. ( L'Aryen, p. 30.) Cénas (1897) The so-called "apron" of the Hottentot women is in no way peculiar to that race. The protuberance of the labiae minores is more frequent among the whites than is generally admitted. It occurs in one out of seven patients examined, to a length of 4 or 5 cms., which is the length of the Bushman apron. (Assoc. Française Avane. Sci., 1897, II, p. 708.) Chalumeau (1896) The less strength an occupation requires, the more it appeals to tall men. ( Influence de la taille . . . 1896, p. I 5-) Souffret (1892) Would the Australian in Europe ever become Ger man, Slav, Celt or Latin? (De la Disparité . . . des races, p. 9.) C. 5. Myers (1909) The racial differences that exist in reaction-times are largely the outcome of similar psychological factors, determined by habits of life and possibly by some ob scure racial tendency to react rather in the sensorial than in the muscular fashion or vice versa. (A Textbook of Experimental Psychology, p. 307.) Kochet (1895) With such a norm [the beau ideal derived from an "anthropology" of the fine arts"] the races would be easy to study and compare. ( Mém. Soc. d? Anthrop. Paris, Feb. 21, 1895.) Driesmans (c. 1900) Whoever wishes to work in this field [race-learning] must for the greater part rely on the living aspects of things as well as on his own feelings; he must at the same time see in the dark and make his way in it. ( Die Kelten, Vol. Ill, p. xi.) A. de Condotte (1873) If Israel peopled all Europe, there would be no more wars, but a very civilized people with excellent qualities and very bearable faults. Science and art would be highly advanced. . . . But the children of the Greeks or Latins, Celts, Slavs or Huns would exterminate them. (Hist, des Sci. et des Savants, p. 405.) Gaillard (1913) History is explained far better by the idea of race than by the idea of nation. . . . The blond type is an anthro pological type possessing the most remarkable qualities and it has served as the finest model in the great periods of plastic art. . . . The blond beauty of Mme d'Etampes did not care for the art of Benvenuto Cellini and no doubt preferred that of Jean Goujon. . . . Only re cently have brunettes been placed in the same rank of beauty as the blonds. Formerly the blonds were always sought after, a sexual attraction due to the greater gen erative qualities of the Nordic races. (Bull. Soc. Anthrop., Oct. 16, 1913, pp. 589-595.) Chavée (1873) . . . the native or acquired difficulty among the Ger mans of getting the nervous centres of the medulla oblongata to carry out the orders of the cerebral centres regarding syllabic sound-production—they say Fa and Pa for Va and Ba— is a pathological fact still observable in our own day. (Bull. Soc. Anthrop ., 1873, p. 505.) Nadaillac (c. 1885) All races are not equally fruitful. Climate, social, eco nomic, biological conditions play a part as yet not sci entifically defined. ... It can be said in general that the Latin races, the French race in particular, are less fecund than the Slavic and Anglo-Saxon races. For us it is a matter of indisputable inferiority. (Affaibliss, de la natalité en France, pp. 71-2.) LITTERATEURS Jean Lorrain (c. 1900) One must cut loose from individuals and fall in love with a race. (M. de Phocas, A Novel.) On Barbey d'Aurevilly (1885) The ancestors of Barbey d'Aurevilly wielded the enormous and heavy two-bladed axe of the Franks. (Rev. du Monde Latin , 1885, p. 209.) T. H. Huxley (1879) The energetic Greek might find fierce joys in a world in which "strife is father and king" but the old Aryan spirit was subdued to quietism in the Indian sage. ( Evol. and Ethics, p. 54.) On Jesus Christ (1933) The name of Galilee does seem of Gallic origin. Christ was Galilean, was he then a Gaul? There is in this an argument highly in favor of Celticism. (Paul Lecour, Atlantis, Sept.-Oct., 1933.) On Renan (1885-1900) Renan ... is the Breton coming to grips with the Gascon, which explains his versatility from dreaminess to irony. (Fouillée, Tempérament et caractère , pp. 340- 4-) It is enough to remember that M. Renan is Breton to see that his imagination comes to him from his race. (Bourget, Essais de Psychol. Contempi pp. 46-7.) Imagine the temperament of a believer, a contem plative being, grown in the mists on the coast of Brit tany. . . . He comes to Paris . . . bringing the devout dream of his race and of the milieu where he grew. (Zola, Le Roman Expérimental , pp. 70-71.) It is a timid race, reserved and living within itself, dull in appearance but possessing profound feelings and car rying into its religious instincts an adorable delicacy. . . . This delicacy which characterizes the Celtic race . . . is equally removed from the rhetoric of feeling too com mon among the Latin races and from the purposeful naïveté of the Germans. (Renan, Poésie des races cel tiques, p. 7.) On Tolstoy (1894) Where one can discover the man who is truly not of the same blood as ourselves is in the idea he has of beauty and art. In him [Tolstoy], an Asiatic impervious to sense-impressions, the plastic sense does not exist, the beauty of form does not touch him. ... In spite of steam, electricity and the newspaper press, the races maintain—all arguments to the contrary notwithstanding —an almost complete autonomy of feeling, sensation and idea. (M. Spronck, Jour, des Débats, June 11, 1894, soir.) On Meredith ( 1 905 ) George Meredith . . . had the serious sympathy of the psychologist for every variety of souls and races. (E. Legouis, Revue Germanique, Jan., 1905, p. 408.) On Mistral ( 1931 ) . . . whereas Mistral brings us the elements of a har monious system, of a rational bloc rooted in the Latin earth, in the earth of France. (F. J. Desthieux, Heures Perdues, V, i93i,p. 129.) Jean Richepin (c. 1910) Before the Aryas, who tilled the soil There lived Turanians, the wandering killers. . . . and though I live in France No Gaul am I nor Latin. My bones Are small, yellow my skin, copper my eyes; I have a rider's stance and full contempt for laws. (La Chanson du Sang.) By and About Bourget (1894-1921) Paul Bourget has opened the way to the symbolist spirit, Wagnerian, Tolstoyian and Ibsenite, which may be great indeed, but not very French, and which on our soil seems dubious and unhealthy. (P. Lalo, Jour, des Débats, June 9, 1894, soir.) One must exacerbate one's national sensibility by contact with the other nations. . . . the naïve Gallo-Roman with his simple but gen erous rationalism . . . against the tentacular Germany with the hard mentality of a predatory race . . . [illus trate] the law of reciprocal national incompatibility. (P. Bourget, ( L'âme étrangère, Illustr., June 11, 1921, pp. 546-7.) On Sidney Dark's The Jew Today (1934) Another fact that Mr. Dark very much minimizes is the importance of race ... in any environment the Jew, even if unorthodox, even if a Christian, remains a Jew. He is a Semite, even as a Chinaman is a Chinaman; physical characteristics are allied to mental and emo tional characteristics, in men, as in horses and dogs. (Sir John Squire in London Sunday Times, Jan. 28, 1934.) On Enesco (1937) The listener felt it as explicable background of Enesco's achievement which is so indubitably of his soil and race. (Olin Downes, N. Y. Times, Feb. 8, 1937.) German Writers' Guild (1934) The German Writers' Guild is convinced that in the present perilous situation of Western civilization no new intellectual order can be created, no literature can spring from such dissolute elements, no style can be formed, no historical rôle can be expected from this part of the world if the idea of Fatherland, considered as a genea logical fact, moral heritage, and language mysticism, does not become the dominant idea and controlling fac tor of the future.—(Hans Johst, President, and Gottfried Benn, Vice-president.) PATRIOTS Pirenne on Belgium (1900-1926) Like our soil, which has been formed by the deposits of rivers coming from France and Germany, our national culture is a kind of syncretism wherein we find the genius of two races mixed together and modified by each other. (Henri Pirenne, History of Belgium, 3rd ed., I, p. il.) On Anglo-Saxon virtue (1932) An appeal for the city-wide revival of the "Anglo- Saxon principles of virtue" was made by Magistrate Michael A. Ford in a hearing on the sale of twenty-six allegedly obscene magazines. ( Neiv York Herald Trib une, April 3, 1932.) Montégut (1857-77) The French people is the only one that has no race instinct. Never did this feeling have any influence in France. (Emile Montégut, Libres Opinions, p. 35.) Al though he [Michelet] has not in the same degree as Thierry a feeling for the genius of race. . . . {Ibid. p. 65.) Caesar's idea of democracy . . . was revived eight een centuries later by a man of Italian race who had the secret of it in his blood. {Ibid., 2nd ed., p. 315.) Jullian (1922) Writers of remarkable intelligence still write "we are Romans with Julius Caesar." The followers of Romanti cism and their heirs protest: "We are Gauls formed by the Druids." The recent discoveries of the Ligurian period have made the fanatics of innovation exclaim: "Avaunt, ye Gauls and Romans, we are Ligurians. {De la Gaule à la France, 1922, p. 83.) France is something of greater worth than Latin or German, namely Gauls . . . what they once were they have remained by virtue of race; I mean the character transmitted at birth. {Ibid., pp. 152, 172.) Suarès (1916-17) A race in history is no doubt the more or less intact remains of a race in nature. (André Suarès, La Nation contre la Race, 1916-17, I, p. 101.) France ... is not a race, but a nation and a nation is a person. {Ibid., II, p. 8.) Whether there are races or not in natural history, there are races in history and history recognizes them (p. 13). A race is the idea entertained by the men who boast of belonging to it. ... A race is the opposite of a nation, for a nation is a spirit (p. 14). The danger of the Germans is that they are a race and not a people (p. 16). A race is the corporeal form of a nation. . . . The forest primeval, that is the race (p. 20). A Socialist on Race (1903) For this task of nationalism, science is invoked. The ories are made about the shape of the skull or the pro nunciation of vowels and consonants. Ammon, Spencer, Lapouge and Lombroso are called upon, between two orisons at the Sacré-Cœur and Notre-Dame de Lourdes. (Eug. Fournière, La Petite République Socialiste , July 29, 1903.) Faguet (1895) The yellow and black perils will smother our race and destroy our civilization. (Jour, des Débats , July 25, 1895.) Schuré on Gobineau (1904-15) Decidedly, France is beginning to do Gobineau jus tice. . . . The Aryan idea sheds a new light on history and might lead to perfecting the race through intel lectual and social selection. ( Précurseurs et Révoltés, 1904, pp. 283-5.) There is a portion of truth in the idea of the dominant characteristic of the human races, of certain effects of cross-breeding, and of the danger resulting from exces sive mixture. ( Revue Polit, et Litt., Nov. 1915, p. 558.) The Latin World (1882-85) To the Latins the Latin world. The Latin idea is not political pan-Latinism, but that of co-operation in the ethnic competition, the struggle between the two indo- european groups of advanced races. (Motto and Plan of the Revue du Monde Latin, founded Dec., 1882, by Baron Charles de Tourtoulon.) The Mulatto Race (1923) Ashamed of my race? And of what race am I? I am many in one. Through my veins there flows the blood of Red Man, Black Man, Briton, Celt and Scot In warring clash and tumultuous riot. (Joseph S. Cotter, The Mulatto and His Critics, 1923.) Abbé Gratry (c. 1850) My family, the race of Adam, the race of the Children of God. . . . [Father Gratry advocating a crusade against the Turks in magazine La Paix.] (Pages Choisies, p. 258.) Hermann Oncken ( 1915 ) The antipathy to the Germans . . . makes the Slavs more deeply conscious of racial antagonisms than our selves. ( Modern Germany, p. 503.) General Marjoulet (1934) Would Gaul have benefited more by being less Latin, or a little more Hellenic, or exclusively Gallic ... ? Modest Gallo-Roman as I am, I cannot help thinking that the affinities of Gaul to the Athenian Republic did not need—God forbid!—to be accentuated. ( Eclaireur de Nice, Jan. 22, 1934.) A recent French History (1932) Since Roman days, our head has been Roman while our soul remained Celtic. (Emille Saillens, French His tory, 1932, p. 19.) Isaac Blümchen ( 1913 -14) Some try to maintain that there are no human races, that a Spaniard or an Eskimo, a Jap, a Norwegian, a Kaffir or a Sicilian, a Patagonian are beings of the same species, with the same faculties, with the same physi ology, mentality and sensibility. The theory is a gross absurdity. (Le droit de la race supérieure, and A Nous la France, p. 54.) PRO AND CON Spinoza If anyone wishes to maintain that the Jews . . . have been chosen by God for ever, I will not gainsay him if he will admit that this choice, whether temporary or eternal, has no regard, in so far as it is peculiar to the Jews, to aught but dominion and physical advantage (for by such alone can one nation be distinguished from another), whereas in regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another. (Ratner, Philos, of Spinoza, p. 70.) On the book "God Among the Germans''' (1934/ The study is based on a thorough discussion of Ger man folk consciousness and points out how Hitler's power is possible through the peculiar race mysticism of his people. Rooted in the Teutonic temperament, this movement has been growing since the ignominious de feat of Versailles, particularly in the unparalleled organ ization of youth, and has been greatly augmented by Alfred Rosenberg's philosophy of Nordic supremacy. (Paul H. Douglas, quoted in publishers' advertisement.) Two botanists on the Vines (1914) There are also species—and this is equally important for the systematizer as for the physiologist—which adapt themselves so completely to changing conditions of moisture that their extreme forms seem to belong to dif ferent species. (Schimper quoted on the title-page of George Russell Shaw's Genus Fîmes.) Bagehot (1869) It may be answered that in this there is nothing new . . . that when a philosopher cannot account for any thing in any other manner, he boldly ascribes it to an occult quality in some race. ( Physics & Politics, p. 2.) Tenne y Frank on the Roman Empire (1916) . . . But it is offered in the hope that a more thorough study of the race question may be made in conjunction with economic and political questions before any at tempt is made finally to estimate the factors at work in the change of temper of Imperial Rome. ( American His torical Review, July, 1916, p. 708.) Jules Sageret (1919) There is no psychology of the races because there is no psychology short and simple. ( Revue du Mois, June 15, 1919, p. 163.) Simar (1920) and Hovelacque (1875) The doctrine of race finds few adherents in France. (Simar, Etude Crit. sur la doctr. des races, p. 246.) It is antiquated to speak of dolicho-Celts and mongo loid Basques and other such fine Germanic inventions, though in truth they were made in Paris. (Hovelacque, Langues, Races, Nationalités, p. 12.) Franz Werf el (1932) The petty bourgeois . . . yearns for "Nordification" or "Latinity"; he concerns himself with Anthropology to prove that his race surpasses all others, though it is well known that the European is a fearful mixture, com pared to which any village cur is a pedigreed race- specimen. . . . All this means an impious and sinful hypostatizing of the body into a single Godhead and conceals behind inflated verbiage the dismal despair of lost souls and sick minds. (Vienna, Neue Freie Presse, March 5, 1932.) Watson Davis on the Advance of Science (1934) There is no doubt that the anthropological topic most widely debated in recent months is a topic that has little or no scientific meaning. This is the burning question: Who is a Nordic and how important is it to be one ... ? Nordicism was evolved as a theory years ago. Dr. K. Holler, well-known German eugenist, credits a Frenchman and a German with awakening the move ment in Germany. The Frenchman, Prince Gobineau (sic) obtained little recognition in his own country, when his work on the inequality of human races was translated into German about the turn of the century (sic). At about the same time, Houston Stewart Cham berlain's [the German?] Foundatio?is of the Nineteenth Century appeared and exercised a profound effect on German thought. (Watson Davis, ed., The Advance of Science, chapter on Living Races, p. 350 seq., Chemical Foundation Publication.) The movement of race betterment by sterilization was started by a group of forward-looking persons who con sidered the enormous improvement in races of plants and animals. . . . These people saw no reason why similar methods should not be adopted for the improvement of the human race. ( Ibid., p. 275.) Ruth Benedict (1929) Anthropology has no encouragement to offer to those who would trust our spiritual achievements to the auto matic perpetuation of any selected hereditary germ plasms. ( Century Magazine, April, 1929.) University of Chicago (1936) The department of anthropology of the University of Chicago approves the suggestion made recently by Dr. I. Zollschan of Carlsbad that the League of Nations call an international conference of scientists to enlighten the world on the question of race. {Neiv York Times, April 27, 1936.) BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES THE following list of books is designed to supplement those mentioned in the text. Any selection from the vast literature is indeed arbitrary, but it is hoped that this one will serve to illustrate orice more the endemic and allo tropie character of race-thinking. chapter i. Few works exist in any language on the gen eral problem of race-thinking as it has been posed in these essays, but several previous attempts contain valuable views and an abundance of facts. First in line comes Th. Simar, with his Etude Critique sur la formation de la doctrine des races, Bruxelles, 1922. It is scholarly, but often unphilo- sophical, anti-German, and inclined to underrate grossly the influence of French ideas on race. Jean Finot, Le préjugé des races / 1906, is critical but limited. The same holds true of A. Firmin, De l'Egalité des races humaines , 1885, designed to vindicate the Negro "race" to which the author "be longs." F. H. Hankins's excellent work on the Racial Basis of Civilization, N. Y., 1926, is concerned chiefly with the Nordic-Aryan idea and deals with it historically and bio logically. Eugene Pittard, Race and History, N. Y., 1926, is a well-written critique of race-doctrines marred by the belief that nationality accounts for most of the so-called racial traits. The point of view of the present study is ad mirably expressed in short compass by George A. Dorsey in C. A. Beard's Whither Mankind, N. Y., pp. 229-263, but without historical background or description of the rami fications of race-thinking in the arts and sciences. A satire 1 All French titles have Paris as their place of publication unless otherwise specified. of the Nordic idea was included by Hilaire Belloc in his Short Talks with the Dead, Kensington, 1926. More re cently Huxley and Haddon in We Europeans, N. Y., 1936, have attempted a refutation of racialism, though with a desire to salvage some of the elements of the thinking they condemn by ascribing too much to local hereditary in fluences. For contemporary evidences of systematic race-thinking, the New York Times Index since the year 1930 furnishes under the heading "Race" some notable and curious speci mens of the usual varieties of racialism. The American jour nal of Sociology provides still more refined examples, of the kind made respectable by the worthy intention of study ing cultures. See also Clark Wissler, Man and Culture, N. Y., 1923, and Salvador de Madariaga, Do the Gods Pre fer Blonds?, Forum, November, 1929. The purely intel lectual use of race-divisions continues in such works as Hirsch's Genius and Creative Intelligence, Cambridge, 1931, and M. T. McClure's Greek Genius and Race-Mixture in Vol. Ill of Studies in the History of Ideas. The proponents of Eugenics must be consulted (e.g., Charles W. Gould, Amer icay A Family Matter, N. Y., 1922) but only in the light of the critique by Raymond Pearl in the American Mercury for November, 1927. The color-problem dealt with in the old terms can be found in J. H. Curie's Our Testing Time, N. Y., 1926, as well as in the re-issue of Lothrop Stoddard's classic. Lastly, the Transactions of the American Philologi cal Association, Vol. xxix and passim, show the persistence of the alliance between race-thinking and linguistics. Simi lar foreign publications in these fields will be listed under Chapter X. chapter n. To the historians cited in the text should be added C. C. Fauriel, Trognon, Raynouard, and Ozanam, whose studies of Gauls and Germans brought them into contact with the race-question in France. Echoes of it are found in the works of the radicals and socialists, Consi dérant, Cabet, Leroux, Louis Blanc, and in most of the well- known Romanticist writers—Vigny (see Cinq Mars and the Journal ), Victor Hugo ( Han d'Islande and Le Rhin), Balzac (La Princesse de Cadignan, Catherine de Médicis, Maître Cornélius ), Mérimée ( Notes d'un Voyage, etc.), Dumas (Gaide et France), Lamartine (Preface to Fatella). The lack of interest in historical origins during the French Revolution is shown by the burning of archives and such pamphlets as Cérutti's Mémoire pour le peuple français. Guich's Origines Gauloises, 1801; de Sade's Histoire de la Nation Française; the Abrégé de l'Histoire . . . à l'usage de l'Ecole Royale Militaire; Dupuis' Histoire des Révolu tions de France; as well as anonymous works like Montes quieu Bon François and La Résurrection des Gaulois show that the intertwining of race and French history was not limited either to cranks or highbrows. To the list of names associated with the new Saxonism in the English-speaking world should be added Sir Walter Scott (Opening Chapter of lvanhoe), J. L. Motley, Bronson Alcott, and the prolific lexicographer, Archbishop Trench. For a full bibliography on the development of the ideas of Tacitus in France to 1789, see J. Barzun, The French Race, N. Y., 1932, pp. 260- 270. chapter in. For the state of anthropology before the days of craniometry it is advisable to read Blumenbach, Cuvier, Buffon, and other notables, but sidelights of great interest are to be found in William Lawrence's Lectures on Com parative Anatomy, London, 1819; in the works of Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, 1799, and Of Six Tall Grenadiers, 1799; in Desmoulins's Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines, 1826; and in J. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy's Des Races Humaines, 1845. Hollard, Virey, Bory St. Vincent, and Humboldt likewise dealt with language, facial angles, and the question of man's place in the animal kingdom. Flourens stated in 1847 the debt anthropology owed to Blumenbach and made some interesting comments on others in the field ( Mém. Institut, xxi, I). In the United States John Campbell's Negromania, Phila., 1851, attempted to refute those who believed in the equality of races and quoted liberally from a score of con temporary scientists to prove the point. The standard work on the French Idéologue philosophers is François Picavet, Les Idéologues, 1891, to be supple mented by L. Halphen, L'Histoire en France depuis Cent Ans y 1914. On the relation of biology and anthropology to religion and scientific dogma, see Walter Scheidt, Allge meine Rassenkunde, München, 1925, and Eric Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology, N. Y., 1936. Balzac, Avant-Propos to the Comédie Humaine, 1842, shows the interest educated men took in the question of evolution as presented by the debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire; and Samuel Butler, Evolution Old and New, London, 1879, re views the history of the theory in a fashion more scholarly and critical than does the Historical Sketch in Darwin's Origin of Species, 1859. chapter iv. The list of books and articles by and about Gobineau has lately grown to such an extent that only the merest hints can be given of what to look for in the search for additional light. The most recent French issues of Gobineau's works, with their publishers, are the Gobineau- Prokesch Correspondence, Plön, 1933; La Fleur d'Or, Gras set, 1928; Etudes Critiques, Kra, 1927; Ce qui se Passe en Asie and l'Instinct Révolutionnaire en France, Cahiers Libres, 1928; L'œuvre de M. de Stendhal, Champion, 1926; Nicolas Belavoir, NRF, 1927. In Germany, Schemann's edi tions of the posthumous works in French, and the transía- tions begun in 1924 and published by the new Verein at Leipzig must be consulted, together with Schemann's Quel len. The works of Gobineau's supposed precursor, Dr. Gustav Klemm, are rather hard to find, but both the orig inal essay entitled Die V er breitung der activen Menschen rasse ueber den Erdball, Dresden, 1845, and the expanded history based upon it are to be found in that city in the Sächsische Landsbibliothek. The essay alone was reproduced in 1906 in the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue. Among Gobineau's biographers, Faure-Biguet is the most recent and in some ways the best. Lange (1924) is very thorough but strongly anti-German, Robert Dreyfus (1905) and the catholic Dufréchou (1907) are the fairest. Sche mann is over-enthusiastic and uncritical on the literary side, while Kretzer and Hahne fairly represent the uses of Gobinism in Germany. The Bayreuther Blätter, May 5, 1881 ; Nov. il, 1882, and May 5, 1886, show the Wag- nerians' attitude towards the Count and Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe, IV, p. 129, reveals the Internationalist view. Other articles of interest are: Frollo, Soyons Gobinistes in Petit-Parisien , Aug. 4, 1904; Thérive, Gobineau Poète, Revue Universelle, 1922; T. de Visan, La Morale de Gobi neau, Akademos, March, 1909; Kretzer, Nietzsche und Go bineau, Frankfurter "Zeitung, July 22, 1902; A. Hallays, Viollet-le-Duc et Gobineau, Jour, des Débats, April 25,1903; Faguet, Le Gobinisme, Revue Latine, Oct. 25, 1906; A. Sorel, Le Comte de Gobineau, Le Temps, Mar. 22, 1904; Barbey d'Aurevilly, La Renaissance, in Les Œuvres et les Hommes; for a Gobinian Bolshevist, Bertreint in La France Libre , June 28, 1923, and for an anti-Gobineau Communist, Th. Balk in Commune, May and Dec., 1934; Gerald M. Spring has studied The Vitalism of Count de Gobineau, N. Y., 1932; Edda Riebe his ideas on eugenics in Gobineau im Lichte der heutigen Rassenhygiene, Göttingen, 1926, and Paul Souday his style in a number of articles published in Le Temps from 1913 to 1929, some of them reproduced in the two series of Les Limes du Temps. chapter v. The use of race in critical judgments has been shown to be well-nigh universal, though systematic treat ments are relatively few. The earliest seem to be: F. J. Fétis, Classification des races humaines d'après leurs sys tèmes musicaux, Bull. Soc. Anthrop., June 21, 1864; Ch. Rochet, Une Anthropologie des Beaux Arts, ibid., Feb. 21, 1895; Bourdin's studies on race and sculpture, Acad, des Sci., 1866; César Daly's similar studies on architecture, 1875- 78, the "evolutionary" studies of language, literature, war, marriage, and the fine arts in the various races published by Ch. J. M. Letourneau in the Bibliothèque Anthropolo gique, XV, 1894, an d the Bibliothèque de Philosophie Con temporaine, 1890-1903. Taine's works, as we know, are informed by the spirit of race-discrimination and an excellent summary of his judgments on cultural matters can be found in Quenelle Harrold's Taine, Master Eclectic of the Nineteenth Cen tury, Columbia Univ. Master's Thesis, 1932. An interesting discussion between Goethe and Zelter ( Briefwechsel, II, p. 481, April 20, 1808) bears on the point. More recent systematizers of race-thinking in the arts are Alois Riegl ( Gesammelte Aufsätze, Vienna, 1929) and Heinrich Wölfflin, one of whose works has been translated into English as Principles of Art History (orig. pub. 1915); also Herbert Read, who bases himself on the work of Thouless designed to show differences in aesthetic percep tions among the various races; Siewers, who adopts Schall analyse and the study of metric as a means of discrimination; Walter Rauschenberger (Frankfurt, 1932), who applies ob scure criteria to philosophical systems in order to find out whether they are Indo-Germanic or not. In between these and the older men just cited are the more casual racialists, Victor Bérard ( Pénélope et les Barons des Iles, Vol. II), Odin, Genèse des Grands Hommes (1895), Lichtenberger (Revue Germanique, Jan., 1905), Gaston Paris (Litt. Fran çaise au Moyen-Age), Larroumet ( Encyclopédie de la Musique, III, p. 1767), Van Gennep (Le Rôle des Germains, Rev. des Idées, Feb. 15, 1906), Ricciotto Canudo (Le Livre de rEvolution, 1908), Y. M. Goblet (Revue de Paris, Mar. 1 5, 1933), G. Poisson (Atlantis, Sept.-Oct., 1933), Eug. Broermann (Le Rhin Gaulois, 1918, and Genèse Atlantique, J 93 3)• chapter vi. Racial aesthetics so frequently merges with Celticism and general philology that it is sometimes difficult to classify authors and their works. On the Aryan question it is useful to consult Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, London, 1890, which gives the anthropological view of the earlier controversy. S. Reinach, L'origine des Aryens, is even more skeptical, as is also Emile Houzé, L'Aryen et Vanthroposociologie. The latest summary in half a dozen pages of the modern ideas on the subject is F. Boas, Aryans and Non-Aryans, N. Y., 1934, dealing with the Jewish problem in Nazi Germany. Going back to the Aryanism of the early nineteenth century, one must take in J. C. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 5 vols., 1836-47, and the no less interesting Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations, 1831. Poesche, Die Arier (1878), together with Penka, Origines Ariacae (1883), and Herkunft der Arier (1886), bridges the gap between the early philologists like Grimm, Bopp, de Rémusat, or Pictet and the modern Aryanism qualified or condemned by Taylor and Reinach. On the Jewish question, a summary comparable to Leroy- Beaulieu's quoted in the text is Lombroso's L' Antisemitismo et la scienza moderna, Torino, 1894. Early American Jews by Lee M. Friedman, The Jews of Germany by Marvin Lowenthal, and an article by Montefiore on anti-Semitism in modern England in the Hibbert Journal (Jan., 1921), all reflect the desire to clarify the race-question in the spe cific terms set by modern prejudice, whereas the writings of Lewisohn and Moses Hess (e.g., Epilogue to Rome and Jerusalem ) merely reinforce racial beliefs by shifting com plimentary labels. Any number of works on Freemasonry, in English, French and German assert the connection be tween that movement and Jewish influences: they can be found in any general bibliography. Perhaps the most inter esting is Nivodo, La Franc-Maçonnerie en France. B. Fay, La Franc-Maçonnerie, 1935, gives a different idea of its origins and activities. Celticism has produced libraries of books and articles. La Revue Celtique is one source of material, Roget de Bel- loguet's excellent Ethnogénie Gauloise, 1858-68, is another. It combines Celticism, anthropology, and sound sense, though under a profound belief in race, and provides a critical analysis of the various streams of Celtic research. Renan's remarks on the Celts are to be found in his Essais de Morale et de Critique, i860, and Questions Contempo raines, 1875. Raoul Allier and Pierre Lasserre have written on Renan and indicated modern indebtedness to him for his racial and other previsions. Napoleon Ill's Histoire de Jules César, prepared by several historians and military ex perts, appeared in Paris in 1865-66 and added to the French consciousness of Celtic and Roman origins. In England, Matthew Arnold wrote On the Study of Celtic Literature, 1867, and Irish Essays (1882), and participated in Celtic demonstrations similar to Renan's Celtic dinners, both move ments being recorded in the current periodical literature. A temporarily popular theory combining speech and race-divisions was that elaborated by Friedrich Müller of Vienna. His Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 4 vols., 1880- 1884, divided mankind according to the texture of the hair and the supposedly correlated form of speech. Haeckel adopted the theory in the later editions of his Anthro- pogeîiie (5th ed., 1903) which also led to the confusion of doctrines in Lefèvre, Les races et les langues, 1893. chapter vu. The Proceedings of the several anthropologi cal congresses that met after 1867 give the best insight into the practices and results of craniometry. Some byways of anthropological thinking, however, can be indicated briefly. Bouglé related Anthropology and Democracy in an article by that title in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale for July, 1897, and again in the Revue Philosophique, Apr., 1900, under the title, La Sociologie Biologique et le Régime des Castes. The Dictionnaire des Sciences Anthropologiques, 1894-95, furnishes the best sampling of the diverse theories on all branches of the subject, but one should also look up Thomas Wright's theory of the posthumous transformation of buried bones through the action of moisture in the Athenaeum for Feb. 25, 1861. Serres's notion about the shape of the heart in the colored and the white races is reported in Le Moniteur for Feb. 3, 1855, after having been taught by the author in his course on comparative anatomy, while the differences found in the shape and texture of lice inhabiting different races of men are described by Murray in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1861, p. 567. The frequent references to the gradual ap proximation of the American Indian type by the white Yankee can be sampled in Laumonier ( Revue Scientifique, July, 1885, p. 116), in de Quatrefages ( Races Humaines, 1887, passim), and in Fouillée ( Psychologie du Peuple Français, 1898, p. 24). Anthropological studies on particular geographical or anatomical regions are numberless. Bloch, like Cénas, wrote on the Lahiae minores as a criterion of race, Bull. Soc. Anthrop., 1898, p. 284; Durand de Gros studied the Noble races in Aveyron, ibid., 1879; Labit covered the Ardennes, Avane, des Sciences, 1897; Atgier examined the conscripts in Vienne (France), Soc. Anthrop., 1898; Mantegazza and Dr. Jacobus each published in 1900 ethnologies of sex; Richter related Nietzsche's doctrines with contemporary biological theories (Leipzig, 1903); Pulle and Sergi sep arately covered Italy in Profilo-antropologico, Florence, 1898, and Le Origini, Milan, 1909, respectively. Twentieth- century periodicals dealing with "scientific" anthropology are for France alone: Encéphale, Anthropologie et Ethno graphie, Revue d'Anthropologie, Anthropos, and Revue de l'Ecole d'Anthropologie. chapters viii-ix. The easy transition from race to nation alism is seen in Blanqui's La Patrie en Danger, 1870; de Quatrefages's La race prussienne, 1871, showing the in vaders of France to be barbaric Finns; and in the refutation signed A. B. in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Berlin, 1872. In the Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1872, Fustel de Coulanges published his famous manifesto denying Ger manic influences in the formation of France, and the fol lowing year Alexandre Bertrand was addressing to Paul Broca his Lettres sur les Celtes, Gaidois et Francs, Rev. d'Anthrop., Apr. 15-Oct. 15, 1873. The feeling of decadence that spread over Europe in the nineties appears in Max Nordau's works, particularly De- generescence; in Bazalgette (translator of Walt Whitman), A quoi tient Vinfériorité française? (1900); Paul Adam, Le Malaise du Monde Latin, 1910; Alfred Beri, Race et Na tionalité, Grande Revue, Oct. i, 1900. Somewhat earlier the poets Strada (Le Promethée de L'Avenir, 1895) and Péladan (La Décadence Latine, 1895) had given varying interpretations of the race-problem in fictional form. The latter was a sequence of fourteen novels, ending with the death of a pretender to the throne of France and emphasizing the epigraph of the series: Finis Latinorum. The Italian politician Colajanni whose Latins et Anglo-Saxons was translated in 1905 and the Brazilian Felix Bocayuva ( Sur /'Arène: Latins et Anglo-Saxons, 1928) con tinue the same tradition. The more cheerful pan-Saxonism is visible in Cecil Rhodes's Last Will and Testament, ed. by W. T. Stead, 1902; Sidney Low in Nineteenth Century for May, 1902; Chamberlain's London speech of Nov. 11, 1895; Lord Beresford's Future of the Anglo-Saxon Race, North Ameri can Review, Dec., 1900; an article in the Alldeutsche Blätter for Apr. 15, 1900, entitled Die Romanen im XXten Jahrhunderts; and Treitschke's Politics, Berlin, 1907. Everywhere culture and race were being judged by standards of contemporary political power. Gehring's Racial Contrasts, Graeco-Latins and Teutons, N. Y., 1908, must be put side by side with Bramsen's Rasse, Kultur, und Kunst, Leipzig, 1905, and Professor Woodberry's lectures at the Lowell Institute on Race Power in Literature, 1903. Homer Lea, The Day of the Saxon, N. Y., 1912, and Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, N. Y., 1916, usher in the era of fears for the white race. Novicow's Avenir de la race blanche, 1897, is somewhat more reassuring on the point, but the question remained open until the War itself, as is shown by works like Boerschmann's Allgemeine Gesetze bei dem Problem des Aufstiegs und des Nieder gangs der Rasse, Würzburg, 1914, the writings of Bern- hardi (e.g., Deutschland und der nächste Krieg, Stuttgart, 1913), and of Nadaillac, Chambrun, Anold, Lapouge, and Demolins in France. The War itself was viewed as a racial struggle by Gohier, La race a parlé, 1916; Chamberlain, Deutsches Wesen, München, 1916; S. Kennedy, The Pan-Angles, London, 1915 ; G. Ferrerò, Le Génie Latin, Revue Hebdomadaire, May 12, 1917; and many others. The conflict brought forth a useful lecture by James Bryce on Race Sentiment as a Factor in History, London, 1915, as well as a good deal of delving into the history of the Germanic Invasions. The typical use of Tacitus and the Nordic Myth is best exempli fied by Eduard Norden's Die Germanische Urgeschichte in Tacitus Germania, 1920, written during the War for the avowed purpose of national and racial glorification. Its 520 large pages are devoted to anthropological and historical comments on the Roman historian's thirty pages of epi grammatic condensation. chapter x. For the National-Socialist Literature, which is immense, it is best to begin with Rudolf Benze's Weg weiser ins Dritte Reich, Braunschweig, 1933, and to proceed with the bibliographies given in the works of Günther, Darré, Clauss, and Erbt (e.g., Weltgeschichte auf rassischer Grundlage, 1934). The catalogue of the firm of Lehmann in München which publishes so many of the German works on race as well as Grant, Stoddard, and Henry Ford ( Der Internationale Jude, 1921-22) also helps. As for the periodi cal literature, both learned and popular, it permits and re quires no survey. In modern France have appeared works of varying scope and merit that can be read in conjunction with those cited in Chapters I and X. M. M. Gorce, La France au dessus des Races, 1934; Georges Montandon, La Race, les races, 1933, which tries to be enlightened about racialism but sticks to somatic criteria; E. F. Fabre, Le Choc Suprême ou la Mêlée des Races, 192 1, which deals with nationality and ought to be compared with Aug. Longnon, Formation de la Nation alité Française, 1922; Muret, Le crépuscule des nations blanches, 1925, to be read at the same time as H. Massis, Défense de rOccident, 1927. In novel form, Marius-Ary Leblond and Louis Bertrand continue the colonial and racialist tradition of Paul Adam with Le Miracle de la Race, 1934, and Le Sang des Races. Malraux, Tentation de VOcci- dent, 1926, has many points in common with Mauclair's L'Orient Vierge which antedates it by a score of years. An ambitious critico-anthropological work by P. Abraham, Créatures Chez Balzac, 1922, deals with the physique and character of the fictional persons in the Comédie Humaine and exemplifies the method applied by Havelock Ellis to British Genius. In English, the modern literature on race can be ap proached through the indexes to periodicals. The names of H. F. Osborn, H. J. Eckinrode, Ellsworth Huntington, McDougall, Langdon-Davies, Seton-Watson, E. M. East, A. E. Wiggam, Roland Dixon, and Lord Acton will suggest others whom they quote or from whom they borrow sci ence, history, or philology according to the usual-pattern. chapter xi. Titles to add to those cited for Chapter I should include these self-explanatory general works: An thropology and Modern Life by Franz Boas, N. Y., 1928; Diet and Race by F. P. Armitage, London, 1922; The Strug gle of Races and Social Groups by H. E. Barnes, Journal of Race Development, IX, p. 394, 1919; The Negro in Chicago, Chicago, 1922; American Minority Peoples by Donald Young, N. Y., 1931 ; Race Differences by Otto Klineberg, N. Y., 1935; Racial Inequality by W. O. Brown, Journal of Negro History, XVI, p. 43. On the question of nationalities: Henri Hauser, Principe et origine des nationalités, 1916; W. D. Babington, Fallacies of Race Theories as Applied to National Characteristics, London, 1895; John Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, N. Y., 19 19; Sageret, La question des races et la science, Revue du Mois, June 15, 19 19; and C. J. H. Hayes, Histori cal Evolution of Modern Nationalism, N. Y., 1931. INDEX Owing to the contused nomenclature of the subject, no attempt has been made to furnish complete cross-references among cognate sub jects. For example , Gallo-Romans, Gauls, Latins, Romans, Celts, Gallic tribes, Gaels and Galicians are overlapping terms, the inter relations of which are discussed in the text but not indicated in the index. Absolutism, 9, 28 Académie Celtique, 151 Action Française, 29, 35 n., 98, 102, 202 Acton, Lord, 105, 339 Adam (and Eve), 14, 64, 151, 320 Adam, Paul, 125, 336, 339 Adams, J. T., 285 Ainos, 13 Albanian(s), 187-188, 255 Alcott, Bronson, 329 Allen, Grant, 105 Allier, R., 238, 334 Alsace-Lorraine, 4, 191, 193, 261, 307 Ammon, 143, 177 n., 181, 218 seq., 245> 319 Ampère, J. J., 129, 130 Angeli, Sir Norman, 256 Anglo-Saxon (s), 7, 16, 21, 30, 37- 39, 41, 45-49, 95, 104, 128, 184, 187, 189, 198, 199, 226 seq., 260, 263, 267-268, 301, 303, 313, 318, 329, 337 : 338 Anthropoids, 12, 224, 276 Anthropology, 15, 50 seq., 106, 141, 159 seq., 246, 257, 296, 324, 325, 335-336 Anthroposociology, 143, 218 seq., 333 Anti-Semitism, 4, 81, 100, 133-134, 146-149, 203-209, 242 seq., 258, 261-262, 276 and n., 310 Aquinas, Thomas, 62 Archaeology, 170-171 Argenson, Marquis d', 29 Aristocracy, 9, 28, 33, 73, 75, 85- 86, 164 seq. Armitage, F. P., 339 Arnold, Matthew, 128, 152, 182, 215, 230, 334 Aryan (s), 8, 18, 23, 35, 71, 80, 84-85, 87, 88, 98, 100, 105, 133, 135-158, 167, 172, 180, 184, 212 seq., 219-221, 223-224, 232, 239, 242 seq., 262, 272, 309, 311, 314, 316, 319, 327, 333 Asiatic Peril. See Yellow Peril. Atlantis, 262 , 314, 333 Aulard, 205 Austria, 55, 71 Babelon, Ernest, 116, 194, 238, 261 Bagehot, 323 Bainville, J., 194, 238, 260 Balkans, 4 Balzac, 56, 74, 86, 121, 122, 126, 129, 153, 304, 329, 330, 339 Barbey d Aurevilly, 313-314, 331 Barnes, H. E., 339 Barre, A., 238 Barrés, 99, 193, 194, 202, 235, 238, 259-260, 261, 303 Barzun, J., 28 n., 27211., 329 Bas, Ph. le, 129 Baser, F., 250 and n. Basque, 136, 323 Bauer, 265 n. Bazalgette, 129, 33Ó Bazin, R., 103, 193, 194 Beard, C. A., 298, 327 Beddoe, J., 175, 219, 224 Beethoven, 195, 236 Belloc, H., 328 Benedict, Ruth, 325 Beneke, 265 n. Benn, G., 317 Bérard, J. F., 265 n. Bérard, V., 333 Berbers, 12, 248 Beresford, Lord, 337 Bergson, 100-101, 182, 238 Bérillon, Dr., 239-241 Beri, A., 309, 336 Berlioz, 22 n., 107, m, 196 Bernard, Claude, 182 Bernhardi, Gen., 254, 337 Bernier, 51 Berryer, 122 Bertillon, 179 Bertrand, A., 153, 155» 33 6 Bertrand, L., 238, 339 Bible, 66 seq., 129, 140 Bichat, 61 Birth-rate, 176, 313 Bismarck, 5, 27, 186, 189, 191 n., 198, 222, 235, 251 Bizet, 249 Blake, 56 Blanc, Louis, 122, 302, 329 Blanqui, 336 "Blood," 7, 13-14, 20, 48, 78, 127, 131, 136, 147, 168, 186, 188, 189, 198, 205, 212, 226, 241, 244-245, 250, 281-282, 315, 318 Blum, Léon, 263 Blümchen, Isaac, 149, 321 Blumenbach, io-ii, 51 seq., 65, 108, 172, 329, 330 Boas, Franz, 51, 296, 297-298, 333, 339 Bocayuva, F., 181, 337 Bodin, 112, 138, 210 Boer war, 232 Boisjolin, J. de, 87, 95, 99 Bonald, Louis de, 33-34, 60, 93 n. Bonnet, 65, 121 Bonstetten, 121, 129 Bopp, 136, 333 Bordeaux, H., 103, 193, 238, 260 Boschot, 130 Bötticher, Paul. See Paul de La- garde. Boucher de Perthes, 170 Boudin, 265 n. Bougie, C., 181, 194, 335 Boulainvilliers, 11, 28 seq., 34, 75, 76, 80, 136, 168, 210, 216, 263 Boulanger, Gen., 200 Bourgeois, L., 194 Bourgeoisie. See Middle class. Bourget, Paul, 97, 99, 194, 201, 3*4» 316 Boutroux, E., 194 Brachycephalic, 13, 23, 55, 58, 133, 142-143, 163 seq., 184, 187, 219-220, 232, 233, 240 Brandes, G., 182 Branting, Hjalmar, 269 Breton (Brittany), 4, 75, 122, 150, 152, 153, 222, 261, 314 Briand, 154, 182, 218, 301 Brinton, Crane, 61 Broca, Paul, 87, 94, 95, 142, 147 n., 155, 159 seq., 219, 303, 310, 336 Brockt, J., 250 and n. Broermann, E., 238, 333 Brownell, W. B., 285 Bruck, A. Moeller van den, 244, 284 Bryce, Viscount, 338 Buchez, 61 seq. Buckle, 103 Buddha, 141 Buffon, 10, 51 seq., 65, 66, 159, 277, 303, 329 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 144 n. Bulwer-Lytton, Robert, 87, 95 Burckhardt, 128 Burdin, Dr., 60 Buré, E., 301 Bürger, 116 Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 294 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902), 306, 330 Cabanis, 59 • Caesar, Julius, 31, 94, 154, 236, 318, 334 Caillaux, Joseph, 208 n. Callet, Aug., 155 Camper, 52 Capital, 72, 302-303 Carlyle, 30, 48, 95, 198, 222 Carmen, 153, 249 Carra de Vaux, Baron, 99, 148 Carus, 108 Casanova, Jacques, 174 n. Catalonia, 4 Catholic(s), 32, 37, 60, 69-71, 103, 160 n., 227, 255, 260, 276 n., 309 Cato, 247 Cavaignac, 122 Cellini, 312 Celt(s), 16, 125 seq., 135 seq., 149- 158, 172, 178, 184, 197, 200, 202 seq., 212 seq., 223-224, 230- 232, 234, 238-239, 240, 254, 266, 272, 292, 301, 311, 312, 314-315, 320, 321, 323, 336 Celticism, 6, 8, 18, 20-21, 31, 45- 46, 49, 75, 108, 114, 128, 134, 144, 151-155» ! 73» 195» 3 r 4> 333» 334 Cénas, 311, 335 Cephalic Index, 58, 163 seq. Challemel-Lacour, 130 Chalumeau, L., 218, 311 Chamberlain, Sir Austen, 293 Chamberlain, H. S., 16, 90, 181, 211, 217, 222, 234, 244, 324, 337 Chamberlain, Joseph, 49, 105, 337 Chambrun, Marquis de, 337 Charcot, 265 n. Charlemagne, 31, 304 Charles II, 177 Chartres, 125 Chasles, Ph., 130 Chateaubriand, 36-38, 122, 196, 218, 304 Chavée, 142, 156, 313 Chekhov, 132 Chervin, 265 n. Chesterfield, Lord, 112 Chevreul, 266 Chevrillon, André, 124 m Chinese, 7, 71, 93, 275 n., 316 Cialdini, Gen., 198 Cimon, 20 Class (correlated with or substi tuted for Race), 22, 112, 157- 158, 164-167, 283-284, 287 Clauss, L. F., 248 and n., 338 Clavel, L., 181 Clemenceau, 130, 182, 205, 306 Climate, 14, 22, 74, 112 seq., 131 seq., 138, 266, 271, 303, 313 Closson, C. C., 98, 142, 181, 218 seq. Colajanni, 181, 232, 337 Coleridge, 76 Collignon, René, 177 seq., 219 Columbus, 279, 305 Combes, Emile, 204 Combes, F., 194 Comte, 60, 86 n., ioi Conrad, Joseph, 16 Conring, 210 and n. Considérant, V., 329 Constant, Benjamin, 36 Corneille, 217 Cornejo, 181 Cotter, J. S., 320 Criminology, 176, 179-180, 303 Criticism, 5, 49-50, 106, 111 -134 Croix de Feu, 262 Cuvier, 64 seq., 172, 329, 330 Czech-Jochberg, 252 d'Annunzio, G., 182 d'Arbois de Jubainville, 153 Dark, S., 316 Darré, Walther, 243, 247, 284, 2 97> 338 Darwin, Charles, 63, 69, 94, 103, 129, 137, 144, 159 seq., 215, 219, 302, 330 Darwin, Erasmus, 65, 67, 160 Daubenton, 52 Daudet, A., 217 Daudet, L., 181, 204, 306 Daumier, 107 Davis, Barnard, 172 Davis, Watson, 324-325 Decadence, 78, 81, 97, 104, 190 seq., 240, 336 Decentralization, 75. See also Re gionalism. Defoe, Daniel, 3 Degas, 110 DeGray, J., 157 n. Delacroix, 107, 126, 127, 131 De Lesseps, 97 Delitzsch, 146 De Maistre, Joseph, 33-34, 93 n., 104 Democracy, 10, 103, 183, 187, 222- 223, 228, 318 Demolins, 225, 229 seq., 337 Deniker, J., 175, 222 Déroulède, P., 193, 194 Desmoulins, 65, 329 De Staël, Baroness, 113 seq., 151, 196, 308 Desthieux, F. J., 315 De Stutt de Tracy, 59, 61, 119 Diet, 266, 294-296, 339 Dimier, L., 238 Dimnet, Abbé Ernest, 84 n. Diseases ("racial"), 265 and n. Disraeli, 149, 189 Dolichocephalic, 13, 55, 57, 58, 133, 142, 163 seq., 184, 219-220, 224, 240, 323 d'Omalius d'Halloy, J. J., 65, 144, 329 Donne, John, 159 Dorsey, G. A., 298, 327 Dostoievsky, 132, 233 Douglas, Paul H., 322 Downes, Olin, 6, 317 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 57 Draparnaud, 59 Draper, 265 n. Dreyfus Affair, 185, 201-209, 252, 261-262 Dreyfus, Robert, 100, 331 Driesmans, 143, 214-217, 222, 265 n., 312 Drumont, Edouard, 102, 133, 181, 200-201, 204, 211 n., 261-262, 306 Du Bois-Reymond, 20 Dubos, Abbé, 29, 36 Ducrocq, G., 261 Dumas (père), 41, 127, 329 Dumesnil, G., 193 Durkheim, 98, 224 Ecole des Roches, 230 n. Edwards, W. F., 43, 53 seq., 108, 159 n. Eichenauer, R., ni, 249 Elliott-Smith, Sir Grafton, 257 Ellis, Havelock, 16n., 105, in, 121 n., 129, 131-132, 181, 292, 339 Emerson, 307 Enesco, 317 England, 7, 47-50, 55, 104, 117, 119, 134, 160 n., 189, 197-198, 211, 2I8, 227, 23I-232, 24O, 253 seq., 256, 334 Eskimos, i2, 265, 275 and n., 277, 321 Essay on the Inequality of Races, 68 n., 72 seq. Eugenics, 221, 241, 244-245, 324- 325, 328, 331 Eulenburg, Philip von, 87, 90 Evans, Wizard, 254-255 Evolution (ism), 50, 58, 63 seq., 69, 94, 137, 170, 183, 186, 223, 228, 272 Faguet, E., 99, 129, 194, 308-309, 3!9, 331 Falloux, 122 Farrère, Claude, 238 Fashoda, 197 Faure, Elie, 103, 126-127, I 3 I Faure-Biguet, 102, 331 Fauriel, C. C., 61, 328 Fausti ian), 214, 215 Fay, B., 334 Fénelon, 122 Ferrerò, G., 181, 232, 338 Fétis, 129, 332 Fichte, 62, ioi, 235 Finns, 57, 136, 145, 256, 336 Finot, J., 181, 238, 327 Firmin, A., 181, 327 Flaubert, 107, 154 Ford, Henry, 338 Ford, Michael A., 318 Fossils, 138, 141 Fouillée, 130, 147, 176, 188, 224, 314- 335 Fourier, 61 Fournière, Eug., 319 Foville, 265 n. Fowler, H. W. and F. G., 18, 307 France, 7, 9, 10, 40, 78, 104, 123, 184, 186, 188 seq., 218 seq., 338 France, Anatole, 87, 103, 203-204, 306 Francistes, 262 Franco-Prussian War, 80-81, 96, 123 n., 185, 190 seq., 227, 235, 2 5* Frank(s), 16, 29 seq., 54, in, 125 seq., 130, 136, 151, 153-154, 168-169, 196, 203, 223-224, 259, 314, 328, 336 Frank, Tenney, 323 Frederick the Great, 235 Freeman, 30, 48, 95, 198 Freemason (s), 147-148, 203 seq., 334 French Revolution, 30, 32-33, 35, 112, 196, 207, 212, 304, 309, 330 Freud, 182, 215, 267-268, 307, 310 Fuchs, G., 211-214 Funck-Brentano, Th., 261 Fustel de Coulanges, 35 m, 201, 336 Gaels. See Gauls. Gaillard, Gaston, 131, 194, 238, 3 12 Gall and Spurzheim, 56, 58, 61, 162 Gallo-Roman (s), 29 seq., 80, 94, m, 130, 136, 168-169, 190, 201, 203, 232, 236 seq., 316, 321 Galton, 129, 223, 303 Gambetta, 130, 180, 191-192 Gaul (s), 16, 55, 125 seq., 151, 153 seq., 168-169, 186, 191 and n., 192, 194, 196, 223-224, 259, 262, 307, 314, 316, 318, 321, 328, 33 6 . Gauthier-Villars, 130 Gébelin, Court de, 150 Gehring, 181, 337 Geiger, 144 Genetics, 15, 24, 174-175, 265, 267, 296-299 Genitalia, 161, 311, 335-336 Gentlemen's Agreement, 5 Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 64 seq., 330 Germania, 28, 338 Germanic invasions, 16, 168-169, 203 seq., 336 Germany, 6, 9, 27, 44, 45, 47, 55, 76, 98, 104, 116 seq., 123, 134, 184, 186, 188, 189 seq., 210-217, 218, 227, 267-268, 319, 330 Gheyn, van den, 146 Gibson and Bell, 53 Gliddon, 172 Gobineau, 10, 29, 68, 71-109, 123, 125, 126, 134, 137, 147, 167, 190- 191, 211 n. and seq., 218, 219, 220, 225, 234, 239, 244-245, 252, 259, 262, 284, 319, 324, 330-332 Gobineau-Vereinigung, 97, 104, 105, 107 Goebbels, 214, 251 Goethe, 63, 65, 67, 86 n., 91, 120, 122, 137, 195, 210, 213, 214, 236, 239, 332_ Goldenweiser, A. A., 296 Gordon, Gen., 186 Gorren, A., 181 Goujon, Jean, 312 Gourmont, Rémy de, 16, 99, 183 Grant, Madison, 181, 187, 337, 338 Gratry, Abbé, 320 Graubard, Mark, 296 Graven, Philip S., 268 n. Greek (s), 9, 19-20, 23, 27, 40, 45- 46, 61, 79, 114, 124, 127, 145, 187, 203 seq., 215, 216, 308, 309, 312, 314, 321, 337 Green, J. R., 30, 48, 105, 236 Gregory, Lady, 152 Grimm, 136, 333 Guizot, Ii, 36, 108, 227 Gumplowicz, L., 98, 181, 218 Günther, 246 seq., 305, 338 Hadas, M., 24 Haddon, A. C., 328 Haeckel, Ernst, 172, 335 Hahne, F., 244-245, 331 Hair (color or texture), 12, 54, 64, 84, 129, 135, 140, 146, 162, 169, 178, 184, 219-220, 239, 240, 245 seq., 296, 302, 312-313 Hallays, A., 97, 331 Hankins, F. H., 327 Hanotaux, 309 Hardy, Thomas, 297 Hartmann, K., 61 Hartmann, R., 143 Hayem, A., 97 Hayes, C. J. H., 339 Hegel, 5, 62, 75, 101, 124, 235, 303 Hehn, V., 142, 214 Heine, 128, 215 Hello, Ernest, 194 Herder, 62, 112, 210 Herodotus, 27, 51 Hindemith, 250 n. Hindu(s), 14, 228 Hinkle, Beatrice, 267-268 Hinzelin, E., 261 Hirsch, N. D., 264-265, 328 History of the Gauls, 42, 54 Hitler, 10, 35, 71, 141, 209, 212- 213, 241, 251, 253, 297, 322 Hoche, Gen., 261 Hoffman, Malvina, 307-308 Hohenlohe, 198 Holland, 4, 256 Holler, K., 324 Holmes, Sherlock, 57 Homer, 113 Hommel, 146 Hotman, F., 210 Houzé, E., 224, 333 Hovelacque, A., 181, 186, 323 Hugo, V., 75, 76, 122, 127, 129, 227, 3 2 9 Humboldt, A. von, 330 Hume, 40 Hun(s), 55, 232 seq., 312 Hunt, James, 160 n. Huntington, Ellsworth, 275 n., 339 Huxley, J. S., 328 Huxley, T. H., 69, 146, 172, 303, 3M Hygiene (race-), 106, 245 seq., 324-325, 328, 331 Ibsen, 316 Idéologues, 59 seq., 119, 124 Immigration, 294 Imperialism, 10, 82-83, 93, 137, 183, 230-232, 236, 272 Indo-European (s), 57, 138 seq., i7 2 _ Intelligence tests, 264-265, 328 Ireland, 4, 105, 135, 149, 152, 231, 266, 334 Italy, 7, 44, 45, 47, 55, 78, 104, 117 seq., 189, 198, 231-232, 234, 240, 256 James, Henry, 16, 182, 284, 304 James, William, 273 Janet, 61 Japanese, 5, 7, 13, 71, 93, 225, 226, *55, 321 Jefferson, 73 Jennings, H. S., 298 Jesus, 314 Jews, 4, 7, 19, 54, 146-149, 157 and n., 200, 202 seq., 212 seq., 222, 233, 245 seq., 254, 265, 305, 316- 317, 322, 333-334 Johst, H., 317 Jones, Sir W., 136 Josephine, Empress, 151 Jullian, Camille, 46, 153, 154, 238, 318 Kaiser. See William II. Kant, 5, 62, 101, 210, 235 Keith, Sir Arthur, 9, 16, 105, 253 seq., 265 n. Keller, Adalbert von, 82 Kemble, 30, 47, 236 Kennedy, Margaret, 134 n. Kergolay, L. de, 75 Keyserling, Count, 254 Kingsley, Charles, 41, 95 Kipling, in, 141, 231, 232, 233, 251» 307 Klemm, Gustav, 10, 108, 331 Klineberg, O., 339 Kloproth, 140 Kollmann, 187 Kroeber, A. L., 296 Ku Klux Klan, 254-255 Kymris, 42 seq., 46, 55, 153-155 Kynast, Karl, 106, 247 Laborde, Dr., 180 Lacretelle, J. de, 103 Lafayette, 306 La Fontaine, 124 Lagarde, Paul de, 211, 234, 244 Lagrange, 122 Lalo, P., 316 Lamarck, 65, 127, 277 Lamartine, 75, 122, 129, 153, 306, 329 Lamber (Mme Juliette Lamber- Adam), 193 Lamennais, 75 Langbehn, J., 244 Lange, Maurice, 96, 238, 331 Lanson, G., 129 Lapouge, Vacher de, 98, 121 n., 133, 142, 143, 145 m, 211 n., 218 seq., 245, 309, 311, 319, 337 Laroche jaquelein, 122 Lassalle, 148 Lassen, 141 Lasserre, P., 134 n., 194, 334 Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes, 49, 301, 309, 337 La Tailhède, 133 Lathom, 28 Latin (s), 7, 16, 46, 78, 99, 114, 128, 130, 134, 184, 187, 194, 196, 199, 202 seq., 226-232, 234, 260, 262, 263, 267-268, 302, 307, 311, 312, 313, 315, 316, 318, 320, 321, 324, 337, 338 La Tour d'Auvergne-Corret, 151 Laumonier, J., 310, 335 Laupts, 187 Lavater, 56 Lavisse, E., 194, 238 Lawrence, Wm., 329 Lea, Homer, 181, 337 Leblond, Marius-Ary, 309, 338- 339 LeBon, 98, 225, 228 seq., 238, 309 Lecour, P., 314 Le Dantec, F., 126, 182, 265 n. Ledru-Rollin, 122 Lefèvre, 181 Leffler, 245-246 Le Goffic, Ch., 194 Legouis, E., 315 Lehmann, J. F., 248, 338 Leibniz, 236 Lemoinne, J., 186 Lenin, 283 Leroy-Beaulieu, A., 205-208, 333 Les Martyrs, 37-38, 44 Lessing, 195 Letourneau, Ch. J. M., 181, 332 Leusse, Comte Paul de, 87, 97, 99 Lézardière, Mlle de, 29 Ligue (Nationalistic Leagues in France), 202 seq. Li Hung Chang, 234 Lindenschmidt, 142 Linnaeus, 51, 65 Lloyd George, 301 Lombroso, 180, 319, 333 Long-skulled. See Dolichoce phalic. Lorrain, Jean, 313 Lote, R., 194, 237 Loudun, Eugene, 122-123 Louis XVI, 45 Louis-Philippe, 122 Lowie, R. H., 296 Loyola, 309 Ludendorff, 71 n. Luschan, F. von, 175 Luther, 45, 282 Mably, 29, 36 McCarthy, Justin, 152 McDougall, Wm., 339 Machen, Arthur, 21 Machiavelli, 236 Madariaga, 285, 328 Madelin, Louis, 261 Mahler, 249 Malraux, A., 339 Manouvrier, L., 224 n. Mantegazza, P., 164, 336 Manzoni, 41 Marie-Antoinette, 45 Maritain, J., 62, 103 Marjoulet, Gen., 321 Martin, Henri, 144, 153 Marx, Karl, 72, 94, 148, 302-303 Marxism, 35, 205, 242 seq., 283, 287, 303 Massis, Henri, 83, 238, 338 Masson, F., 238 Masson-Forestier, 131 Mauclair, C., 238, 339 Maupassant, 154, 217 Maupertuis, 65 Maurras, Charles, 62, 99, 133, 194- 195, 202 seq., 236 Mazzini, 76 Meigs, Charles D., 88 Mémoires d'Anthropologie (by Broca), 161 seq. Mencken, H. L., 157 Mendelssohn (s), 213, 249 Meredith, George, 22 n., 152, 305, y 5 Mérimée, 61, 75, 87, 129, 153, 272 n., 289, 329 Mesati- (or Meso-) cephalic, 164 Mexico, 7, 189, 256 INDEX 349 Meyerbeer, 128 Mezzofante, 55 Michel, F., 129, 27211. Michelet, 3211., 36, 44-46, 196, 318 Middle class, 9, 30 seq., 33, 190, 310, 324 Mignet, 61 Militarism, 176 seq., 231, 272 Mill, John Stuart, 299 Mind, 13, 22, 23, 60, 278-279, 282- 284, 287-289, 291 seq., 299 Mistral, F., 194, 315 Mithouard, A., 103, 195, 238 Mixed race (or blood), 20, 78 seq., 87, 92, 99, 103, 126-127, 187, 258, 307, 320, 324. See also Pure race (or blood). Möbius, 131 Mohl, Jules, 87 Molée, Elias, 155 Molière, 217 Mommsen, 42 Mongan, Agnes, no Mongolian(s), 12, 23, 145, 222, 2 34' 2 37> 3 2 3 Monod, G., 192-193, 205 Monogenists, 64, 69-70 Montaigne, 126, 127, 131 Montandon, G., 175, 338 Montefiore, 334 Montégut, 130, 282, 318 Montesquieu, 10, 11, 29, 30, 72, 74, 80, 108, 112, 138, 263, 329 Montlosier, Comte de, 34-35, 38 Moréas, Jean, 133, 203 Morgan, T. H., 298 Morice, Charles, m Mortillet, G. de, 142, 143 Morton, 108, 172 Mosley, Sir Oswald, 105, 256 Motley, J. L., 329 Mozart, 119, 195 and n. Muffang, H., 98, 142, 143, 181, 218 seq., 245 Müller, Fr., 142, 334-335 Müller, Max, 78, 140-142 Muret, M., 238, 338 Mussolini, 4, 253, 254, 269 Myers, C. S., 311 Nadaillac, Marquis de, 142, 313, 337 Napoleon I, 30-32, 60, 118, 235, 304 Napoleon III, 93, 123, 129, 130, 189, 198, 290, 334 Nasal index, 168-169, 178 Nationalism, 10, 16, 34, 39 seq., 62, 94, 103, 107, 112, 142-146, 171-173, 183 seq., 188 seq., 232 seq., 255 seq., 259-260, 272, 284seq., 319, 338-339 National-Socialist Party, 4, 7, 13, 18, 71, 92, 146-147, 200, 204, 210, 242 seq., 310, 338 Nazi. See National - Socialist Party. Negro, 4, 7, 12, 53, 68, 78, 87, 89, 139, 224, 225, 255, 266, 270, 275-277, 303, 305, 320, 327, 330, 339 Negus Negusti, 4 Nelson, John M., 296 Nevinson, H. W., 129, 233 Newman, Ernest, 6 Newton, 52, 86 n., 129 Nichols, Beverley, 256 Nicolucci, 219 Niebuhr, 42, 44, 108 Nietzsche, 5, 10, 86 n., 87, 89-92, 101, 128, 181, 211, 215, 216, 235, 244 and n., 259, 331, 336 Nordau, Max, 336 Nordic(s), 7, 9, ii, 12, 18, 27 seq., 33» 7 1 » 73» 8 °. 84-85, 87, 98, 107, 113, 118, 132, 172, 191, 216- 217, 242 seq., 264, 270, 279, 297, 302, 305, 307, 313, 324, 327, 338 Norman (s), 16, 38, 54, 173, 197 Nott, 172 Oakesmith, John, 339 Odin, 181, 333 Oncken, H., 321 Origin of Species, 63, 69, 137, 159-160, 330 Osborn, H. F., 305, 339 Ossian, 113 seq., 150 Ottar J ari, History of, 85, 86 n., 9 2 Ozanam, 328 Palestine, 4 Pan-German League, 188 Panzer, F., 250 n. Paris, Gaston, 333 Peacock, Thomas Love, 56 Pearl, Raymond, 328 Pearson, Karl, 252 Péladan, Sar, 336 Penka, K., 104, 142, 144, 145, 333 Perrier, E., 239 Persia, 4, 76, 79, 82, 135, 256 Peters, Willy, 157, 268-269 Petrie, Flinders, 258 Philosophy, 15, 180, 183, 278-279, 283-284 Phrenology, 56-57, 59, 162 Picot, E., 238 Pictet, Adolphe, 138 seq., 333 Piérard, L., 301 Pinkerton, John, 40, 42, 151 Pirenne, H., 318 Pittard, E., 181, 285, 327 Plato, 73, 283 Ploetz, A., 245 Plutarch, 247 Poesche, 142, 144, 333 Poincaré, H., 267 Poincaré, R., 125, 182, 261, 306 Polygenists, 64, 69-70 Pott, 89, 141 Pouchet, G., 181 Prévost-Paradol, 130 Prichard, J. C., 42, 78, 108, 172, 333 Prokesch-Osten, Baron, 87, 93 n., 33° Proletariat, 33, 220 seq. Protestant (s), 99, 203 seq., 254 Proudhon, 82, 303 Proust, 126, 127 Pruner-Bey, 147 n., 166, 170, 172 Pure race (or blood), 19, 34, 55, 78 seq., 87, 92, 99, 102, 129, 139, 226-227, 228, 240, 258. See also Mixed race (or blood). Quatrefages, J. L. A. de Bréau de, 87, 95, 108, 146, 224 m, 335, 336 Quinet, Edgar, 36, 39, 122, 129, 308 Rabelais, 22 n., in, 130 Racine, 126, 127, 131, 217, 306 Ranke, L. von, 42 Ratner, Joseph, 322 Ravel, 22 n. Regionalism, 261 Reinach, S., 146, 151, 205, 333 Religion (Christian), 63 seq., 71 n., 75, 91-92, 139, 148-149, 203-209, 309, 310 Rembrandt, 244 n. Rémusat, Abel de, 137, 140, 333 Rémusat, P. de, 87, 95 Renan, 10, 87, 88-89, 99' I0I > I0 4' 127, 129, 146, 147 and n., 152, 200, 204, 207, 211 n., 225, 228, 3 I 4"3 I 5> 334 Retzius, 57-58, 108, 166, 170, 172 and n., 175 Rhine, n6n., 154, 173, 188, 189, 192, 199, 333 Rhodes, Cecil, 49, 198, 236, 251, 301, 309, 337 Ribot, 130 Richelieu, 216, 235, 306 Richepin, Jean, 316 Ripley, 175 Robert, P. L., 130 Robertson, 105 Rochet, Ch., 312, 332 Roget de Belloguet, Baron D. F. L., 87, 334 Roheim, 307 Rolland, R., 97, 331 Roman(s), 16, 23, 28, 31, 33, 36, 4 1 , 42, 45, 46, 55, 134, 150, 151, 203, 262, 308, 318, 321, 323, 337 Romanticism, 10, 40 seq., 73, 76- 77, 83-84, 93, 101, 112-113, 115, 134, 196, 210, 318, 329 Roosevelt, F. D., 258 Roosevelt, Theodore, 86 n., 212 Rosenberg, A., 243, 284, 322 Rosenfeld, Paul, 22 n., in, 130 Rossini, 118, 119, 249 Round-skulled. See Brachyce- phalic. Rousseau, J.-J., 29, 96 m, 121, 122, 2°3 Rovère, J., 238 Royer, Clemence, 144, 186 Rumania(ns), 7, 234, 256 Ruskin, 128, 182 Sageret, J., 239, 323, 339 Saillens, E., 321 St. Simon (memorialist), 29 St. Simon (Utopian Socialist), 60 seq. Sainte-Beuve, 61, 121 Sanskrit, 78, 91, 108, 135 seq. Sanson, A., 174-175 Saunier, M., 239 Sayce, 105, 145 n., 236, 256-257 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Car olyn von, 100 Scandinavia, 4, 7, 37, 57, 80, 83, 84-85, 145, 256 Scantrel, Yves. See Suarès. Schemann, L., 90, 105-106, 248 and n., 330-331 Schiller, 195, 197 Schimper, 323 Schlauch, M., 158, 283 n. Schlegel, Fr., 62 Schönberg, 250 n. Schopenhauer, 61, 87, 90, 137, 244 n. Schultze-Naumburg, 248 and n. Schuman, Frederick L., 283 Schuré, Ed., 193, 238-239, 319 Schwabe, Julius, 107 Science, 10, 23-24, 55, 74, 159 seq., 183, 214, 218, 229, 239, 263 seq., 271, 312, 319, 324 Science Sociale, 225, 229 seq. Scott, Sir Walter, 40, 122, 329 Seillière, Baron Ernest, 32, 134 n., 181, 238, 308 Semite, 8, 35, 46, 81, 87, 88, 99, 135-158, 184, 216, 245 seq., 272, 306. See also Jews; Anti- Semitism. Sénancour, 122 Sénart, 142 Sergi, 219, 232, 336 Shakespeare, 8, 122, 128, 197, 217 Shaw, Bernard, 12, 292, 302 Shaw, George Russell, 323 Sicilian (s), 12, 295 Siegfried, A., 291 Sieyès, 29 seq. Simar, Th., 323, 327 Simon, Sir John, 8, 105, 257 Slav (s), 37, 46, 145, 184, 187, 188, 200, 202, 228, 233, 238, 304, 311, 312, 313, 321 Slavery, 68 Small, A., 310 Socialism, 98, 103, 122, 146-149, 184, 199 seq., 206, 217, 222, 231, 233» 3 10 ' 3 2 9 Sofer, 265 n. Sorel, Albert, 84, 87, 95, 100, 189, 331 Soret, 63 Souday, Paul, 103, 332 Souffret, F., 181 Soutzoff, 160 n. Spain, 104, 117, 119, 160 n., 189 Species, 14, 65 seq. Spencer, 63, 69, 222, 319 Spengler, 62, 215, 242 Spiess, C., 99, 101, 238-239 Spinoza, 137, 322 Spronck, M., 315 Spurzheim. See Gall and Spurz- heim. Squire, Sir John, 317 Staviskv affair, 262 Stead, W. T., 49, 309, 337 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 61, 74, 75, 91, 92, 102, 107, 116 seq., 124, 128, 151, 235, 259, 330 Stirner, Max, 303 Stoddard, Lothrop, 181, 187, 258, 328, 338 Strada, 194, 336 Stroh, F., 248 and n. Stubbs, Bishop, 30, 48, 108, 236, 2Ó3 Suarès, André, 99, 232, 234, 237 seq., 319 Sully, Duke of, 235 Sully-Prudhomme, 194 Swastika, 141 and n. Swift, 79 Synge, 152 Syveton, A., 194 Tacitus, n, 27 seq., 31, 41, 49, 263, 271, 284, 329, 338 Taine, 10, 87, 88-89, 99' I01 » I0 4i 118, 123-126, 131, 225, 304, 332 Talleyrand, 236 Tarde, 98, 142, 224, 225 seq. Taylor, Isaac, 105, 141, 175, 333 Tertullian, 284 Teuton (s), 8, 37, 49, 104, 184, 187, 207, 231, 239, 306, 322, 337 Thierry, Am., 36, 42, 54 seq., 108 Thierry, Aug., 10, 11, 36, 38-39, 44-46, 61, 104, 108, 125-126, 167, 3 18 Thiers, 38, 122 Third Reich, 6, 10, 35, 106, 134, 146, 181, 192 n., 242, 244 seq., 284, 338 Thompson, Francis, 49 Thucydides, 20 Thurnam, 11, 172 Tiersot, 129-130 Timrod, Henry, 232 Tocqueville, 76 Tolstoy, 233, 269, 315, 316 Topinard, P., 172, 179, 187, 283 Törok, A. von, 161- Tourtoulon, Baron Ch. de, 320 Tourville, H. de, 225 seq. Treitschke, 337 Trench, Archbishop, 329 Troeltsch, E., 199 Trognon, Aug., 328 Turkey, 4, 7, 234, 256 Two Frances, 32; book by Seip- pel, 32 n., 41, 133, 204-209, 230 Tyndall, John, 20, 70 Ujfalvy, 142 United States, 4, 5, 7, 68, 189, 231, 256, 258, 264, 294, 301, 330 Vacher, 180 Vacher de Lapouge. See La- pouge. Vanderkinder, 87 Van Düben, 172 Velasco, 160 n., 181 Venus of Melds, 252 Véran, J., 262 Vercingetorix, 204 Vico, 112 Vicq d'Azyr, 59 Victoria, Queen, 47 Vigny, Alfred de, 329 Villemain, A., 129 Villers, Ch. de, 308 Viollet-le-duc, 87, 95, 99, 125- 126, 331 Virchow, R., 143, 172, 22411. Voice-analysis, 269, 313, 332 Voltaire, 29, 121, 137 Wagner, Richard, 82, 87, 89 seq., 97, ioi, 106, 128, 211 and n., 234, 250, 316, 331 Wagner, Rudolph, 159 n., 172 Walker, E. M., 20 Wallace, Alfred Rüssel, 69 Weidenreich, F., 248 and n. Weill, Kurt, 250 n. Wells, H. G., 48 Werfel, F., 324 What is the Third Estate?, 30 Whitelock, W. W., 199 Wieser, M., 248 and n. Wiggam, A. E., 263 Wigman, Mary, 243 n. Wilde, Oscar, hi William II, 5, 83, 185, 209 seq. Wilser, 142 Wilson, Woodrow, 258 Winckelmann, 120 Wolff, 42 Woltmann, Ludwig, 118, 121, 216, 218, 222, 249 Wolzogen, Hans von, 87, 90 Woodberry, G. E., 337 Woodbridge, F. J. E., 169 World War, 5, 100-102, 185, 218, 229, 232 seq., 253, 337-338 Wyndham Lewis, D. B., 307 Yeats, W. B., 152, 292-293 Yeats-Brown, Major, 256 Yellow Peril, 7, 18, 81-83, 93, 237, 258, 263, 309, 319 Young, Donald, 339 Yule, G. Udny, 280 Zaborowsky, 145, 187 Zend-Avesta, 135 Zeppelin, Count, 269 Zola, 133, 204, 217, 314 Zollschan, 325